ECINF, the Urban Informal Economy survey, is a sample survey that was conducted by IBGE in 1997 and 2003 to investigate the informal sector in Brazil, characterized by self-employed workers and employers running a business with up to five employees. The main interest of this survey are businesses' characteristics, such as operating location (whether it operates in a store, in a motorized vehicle etc.), type of clientele, investments made in the previous year, age of the business, etc. In 2003, ECINF's sample covered 54,595 households, with a total of 195,504 individuals.
Users can access the microdata collected in these household surveys. Due to the large number of topics investigated, there are several microdata files in each year. In order to use the packages, the user must first obtain the microdata related to the rounds she is interested in. Data Zoom does not provide these data. There are no files available for download. For information on how to acquire the microdata and other files, click here.
Data Zoom provides a tool for reading the microdata through STATA, generating STATA format files (.dta ) without any data manipulation.
To install the packages, type "net from http://www.econ.puc-rio.br/datazoom/english" in STATA's command window and click on "datazoom_ecinf". Due to the large number of options available to the user and the need to insert information for the proper functioning of the programs, it is strongly recommended that you use the package via dialog box. To access it, type "db datazoom_ecinf" in the command window. The package also has a help file to support the user. It can be accessed through the dialog box or by typing “help datazoom_ecinf” in the command window.