summarize the data underlying the panel estimators employed later and offer further insight into the nature of the sectors. First, as has been noted in other developing countries, there is a relatively high degree of mobility. For instance, of those declaring themselves formal salaried at the beginning of the period, only 63% were still in that sector at the end of the year. Second, to the degree that turnover is a measure of attachment to a sector (as opposed to rates of firing), formal salaried, civil employment and self-employment show a comparatively high percentage of stayers, (low rate of turnover) at 63%, 69%, and 66% respectively. Informal salaried employment, on the other hand, has the highest rate of turnover; the proportion of stayers is only 45% implying that over half of the sector leaves to other sectors in a year. This, and the demographic patterns noted above, are consistent with it being a sector of entry of relatively young people who are shopping around for their next (superior) employment. Further insights can be gleaned from studying the patterns of mobilility among sectors although, as with the conditional wage comparisons discussed earlier, they cannot offer robust conclusions about the relative desireability of the various sectors.<sup>14</sup> Hence, we turn to an examination of the job satisfaction data. Returning to the unconditional tabulations in Table 1, several notable facts emerge. To start with, relative to other regions, Ghanaian workers are somewhat less satisfied with their jobs. Using the more homogeneous group of formal salaried workers as the comparator, Ghana yields a value of 3.33. To put this into perspective, consider that a rudimentary rescaling of the seven point scale used by Benz and Frey (2008b) into a comparable five point scale yields

> 14For instance, consistent with the age patterns discussed above, informal salaried workers have relatively high rates of transition to formal employment (15%) destination sector, and to self-employment (22%). Given the diminutive size of the formal sector compared to self-employment (13% of the labor force compared to 43% with roughly equal levels of turnover), this does suggest the informal salaried do have a relative high predisposition towards formal employment. The overall rapid turnover and propensity to move into formal work may suggest a classic queuing story with informal salaried employment being a less desirable holding pattern for formal employment. That said, the high level of reverse flows from formality into informality suggests that the joint market may be behaving more competitively, and utility at the margin potentially equated for many workers. By contrast, the self-employed show relatively little mobility into formal salaried work or civil work and vice versa. Two hypotheses suggest themselves in this case. First, that there is a high degree of segmentation between the self-employed and formal salaried markets, perhaps serving as a retirement ground for older dismissed formal sector workers. Alternatively, it may be that self-employment is the long run destination of workers once they have accumulated sufficient human and financial capital. In the first case, the sector is likely to show lower levels of welfare. In the second they could be higher. See (Bosch and Maloney, 2010) for a discussion of inference based on transition matrices and comparable exercises for Latin America.

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