INSEAI advances debate on labour informality, gender and migration in Costa Rica through secondment activities

INSEAI has carried out in August 2026 a series of academic activities in Costa Rica combining seminars, workshops and conferences within its secondment programme, strengthening collaboration between the Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM, Spain) and the National University of Costa Rica (UNA).

INSEAI Seminar: feminist economics and informality in Costa Rica

On 18 August, the seminar “Labour Markets and Informality: A Feminist Economic Analysis” was delivered by Diana Ochoa Díaz, professor and predoctoral researcher at UAM. The session examined the relationship between informal work and gender inequality in Costa Rica from a feminist economics perspective, focusing on gender segmentation within informal employment.

The professor highlighted the concentration of women in home-based and domestic work, where they face lower incomes, shorter working hours and greater structural precariousness, despite having relatively higher educational attainment than men. Held in a hybrid format (in-person and broadcast online via Microsoft Teams), the event was part of the INSEAI Lectures series and helped to illustrate how labour-market participation, gender segmentation and informality intersect in the Costa Rican context.

Workshop on informality in Latin America and Spain at UNA

As part of her secondment at the National University of Costa Rica, Diana Ochoa and Julimar da Silva Bichara (UAM) took part on 24 August in the “Workshop on Informality in Latin America and Spain”, organised at the Faculty of Social Sciences of UNA together with Shirley Benavides and Leonela Artavia Jiménez.

The workshop explored informality from a comparative perspective between Latin America and Spain. In her presentation, Ochoa deepened the gender dimension of informality, while da Silva presented an experiment on attitudes and willingness towards informality, providing evidence on the factors influencing social acceptance and individual decisions regarding informal work.

The activity reflected the role of INSEAI’s research mobility in connecting institutions, methodologies and disciplinary approaches, with the aim of enriching the understanding of informality across different socioeconomic contexts.

Conference on labour informality and migration in Latin America

On 25 August, the agenda of secondment-related activities continued with the conference “Labour Informality and Migration: An Approach to Latin America”, led by Julimar da Silva Bichara. The event, organised with the participation of the School of Economics of UNA and the group Trabajo y Crisis, was held in the Sala de Ex Rectores of the Central Library of the National University.

The conference provided a space for discussion on the links between migration, labour informality and economic development in Latin America, extending the debate initiated at the previous day’s workshop and reinforcing dialogue between INSEAI network researchers and the Costa Rican academic community.

A secondment period that consolidates UAM–UNA cooperation

These three activities (seminar, workshop and conference) form part of the research secondments planned under the INSEAI project, which seeks to generate comparative knowledge on informality and the policies for its formalisation in the European Union and Latin America.

The combination of approaches (feminist economics, experimentation on attitudes towards informality and analysis of migration and development) and the participation of researchers from UAM and UNA exemplifies INSEAI’s commitment to an interdisciplinary and transnational research agenda, with both academic and public-policy impact.