Pre-Assessment: Health-Associated Cost of Urban Informal Industrial Sector

Abstract

Marginalised urban migrants thrive in informal economies, where health and safety are often neglected. Findings on previous studies have listed several informal characteristics; occupational injuries and diseases in informal setting; and components of health expenditure. This paper attempts to assess the health-associated cost in an informal industry through a questionnaire containing basic information of the respondent and household members, as well as economic and occupational assessments. The challenges that must be addressed include the different types of jobs surveyed, target population, biases from occupational/non-occupational cost and household/individual expenditure, and the validation method. This paper serves as a policy-tool reference to improve the well-being of informal workers by improving the nationwide workforce survey. Keywords: informal sector; health expenditure eISSN 2514-7528 © 2017 The Authors. Published for AMER ABRA by e-International Publishing House, Ltd., UK . This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). Peer–review under responsibility of AMER (Association of Malaysian Environment-Behaviour Researchers), ABRA (Association of Behavioural Researchers on Asians) and cE-Bs (Centre for Environment-Behaviour Studies), Faculty of Architecture, Planning & Surveying, Universiti Teknologi MARA, Malaysia.