Beyond the law-in-the books: Labour enforcement in Senegal

Existing research often assumes that the letter of labour codes is an adequate proxy for effective regulation. This presentation empirically shows that such an assumption makes little sense for Senegal. We collect new objective measures of private and public labour enforcement, including workers’ awareness of their rights, access to the judiciary, penalties, and labour inspection resources and activities. We document that Senegal, as well as other countries in Francophone West Africa, is characterised by a combination of protective/stringent in-form labour codes and little enforcement efforts. Furthermore, we show that labour inspections target large and registered firms, while labour violations are more prevalent in small and unregistered firms, implying that the problem is substantially more complex than a lack of public inspection funding. We speculate it is mostly about the lack of effective representation of vulnerable workers in the policymaking process.

This Knowledge Exchange Seminar is facilitated by the ILO Research Department as a platform for dissemination of research findings and exchange of ideas. The views expressed in this seminar are those of the authors and do not reflect the views of the ILO nor of its constituents.

Lucas Ronconi is Professor of Economics at University of Buenos Aires and researcher at CONICET in Argentina. He is also a non-resident research fellow at IZA (Germany) and PEP (Kenya). His research focuses on labour market institutions in developing countries. He has published extensively on labour informality and enforcement. He previously worked at the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment at UC Berkeley.

Thierno Malick Diallo, PhD. is a lecturer at Gaston Berger University and a non-resident research fellow at Partnership for Economic Policy. His research centres around labour economics, gender, poverty, and rural economics. He has been involved in research collaborations with the Partnership for Economic Policy (PEP), the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), and the African Economic Research Consortium (AERC).

Fabiola Mieres joined the ILO Research Department in 2023. Her main current areas of work include compliance with labour protection and temporary labour migration.