Through a Tanzanian case study, this paper challenges the claim, along with the statistics that
support it, that self-employment is the dominant employment status in the informal economy. The
paper begins by reviewing key insights from relevant literature on the informal economy to argue
that conventional notions of ‘wage employment’ and ‘self-employment’, while unfit for capturing
the nature and variety of employment relations in developing countries, remain central to the design
of surveys on the workforce therein. After putting statistics on Tanzania’s informal economy and
labour force into context, the analysis reviews the type of wage employment relationships that can
be found in one instance of the informal economy in urban Tanzania. The categories and terms used
by workers to describe their employment situation are then contrasted with those used by the latest
labour force survey in Tanzania. The paper scrutinises how key employment categories have been
translated from English into Swahili, how the translation biases respondents’ answers towards the
term ‘self-employment’, and how this, in turn, leads to the statistical invisibility of wage labour in
the informal economy. The paper also looks at the consequences of this ‘statistical tragedy’ and at
the dangers of conflating varied forms of employment, including wage labour, that differ markedly
in their modes of operation and growth potential. Attention is also paid to the trade-offs faced by
policymakers in designing better labour force surveys.