Dependency, resource extraction and informality in Africa: how primarisation drives informal employment

This study seeks to empirically demonstrate and theoretically articulate the relationship between extractive economies and informal labour in Sub-Saharan Africa. We utilise a multivariate OLS regression across a series of models which demonstrate a statistically significant relationship between countries’ reliance on the extraction of natural resources (i.e. primarisation) and the rate of informality in a country’s total workforce. Our findings and discussion demonstrate the theoretical and empirical shortcomings of the dominant liberal explanations for informality. Instead, we argue that a Marxist dependency theory framework aligns most closely with the reality of the nature of both informality and primarisation on the Continent. We argue that informality in Africa is significantly rooted in neocolonial relations of extractivism imposed upon the continent by the structures of global capitalism, including geopolitical and economic conditions of domination and unequal exchange that the global system entails.