Econometric Analysis of Employment Generation Through Street Vending in Guwahati City, Assam

Abstract

Street vending is part of the informal urban economy and is an important part of the economy in fast urbanizing cities like Guwahati where it helps to sustain livelihood. The present study empirically examines the street vendor's contribution to the employment generation in Guwahati city and also extends this study to comparatively analyze it across Northeastern states. The main goal is to understand the effectiveness of street vending in absorbing surplus labour and generating self-employment
in the informal sector.
A cross sectional econometric approach is used to investigate the factors causing street vendors to be more or less employed. Both primary and secondary sources of data have been used to analyze the data and important explanatory variables that are included are capital investment, education level, hours of work, access to credit and market infrastructure. These variables are used in a multiple regression (OLS) model to estimate the relation between these variables and employment outcomes.
Overall, the empirical findings suggest that street vending is an important avenue for improving employment, but the impact differs across NE states as certain states are less well equipped to support street vending, have less street infrastructure, and are less developed in the market. States with more developed urban infrastructure, such as Assam, have more employment intensity than smaller, less urbanized states.
The study findings suggest that enhancing financial inclusion, upgrading urban infrastructure and formalizing street vending into the urban governance system are critical to the promotion of inclusive and sustainable employment growth in the informal sector.