We analyze how the relationship between economic complexity and the internalization of desirable behavioral rules for formalization affects informality performance. We use the Economic Complexity Index (ECI), which links a country's productive structure with the amount of knowledge and know-how embodied in the goods it produces, and addressed that the motivation to formalize is intrinsic to a greater cultural capacity, e.g. via adoption of civil society values, reduction of corruption in the public sector, and the percentages of informal workers as a measure of informal work. Using unbalanced panel data on developed and developing countries for the period of 2010–2020.We employ the instrumental variable technique. We show empirical evidence that countries moving to higher levels of economic complexity and adopting desirable behavioral rules lead to an overall reduction in informality.