A Bibliometric Look at Informal Entrepreneurship from Different Scenarios

Abstract

This study conducted a bibliometric analysis of informal entrepreneurship in the period 2020-2025, identifying 71 high-impact articles that were indexed in the SCOPUS bibliographic database. These results show that, despite its growing academic relevance, research on informality remains fragmented and concentrated in certain countries and authors, reflecting inequalities in the production and circulation of knowledge. Countries such as the United Kingdom, the United States, and Finland lead the way in scientific output, while Latin America and Africa show a high incidence of informality and limited participation. The findings show that informal entrepreneurship is a very complex phenomenon, which is conditioned by various structural factors such as education, available formal employment, and income; personal factors such as social networks, resilience, and gender; and contextual factors such as the pandemic, governance, and economic crisis. This diversity of factors explains its ambivalent nature, being on the one hand a means of subsistence and an adaptive response to exclusion from the formal labor market, and on the other hand, evidence of a limit to business productivity, hindering tax collection and reproducing itself through socioeconomic inequality. That is why the impact of informality on sustainable development is so significant. It contributes to job creation and local dynamism, but also poses risks in terms of lack of social protection and precariousness. This raises the need to create differentiated policies that recognize the heterogeneity of entrepreneurs and the contexts in which they operate. Therefore, the most effective strategies must include incentives for formalization sequences, the creation of capacity-building programs, and access to regulated financing.