in the emerging economies analysed in this chapter selfemployment represents of total female employment compared to an oecd average of and it reaches very high levels in countries like colombia and peru however evidence from latin america shows that this difference disappears when larger firms with similar labour and capital inputs are compared bruhn these patterns span both urban and rural areas in the agricultural sector women tend to farm smaller plots with lower yields and less profitable crops than men world bank the figure for india is based on the assumption that all employed workers with missing information on paying social contributions work in the informal sector informality rates for china morocco the russian federation and tunisia are missing given the unavailability of comparable data on social security contributions and business registration