Informal Economy

On 29 April 2021, the European Platform tackling undeclared work (hereafter the ‘Platform’) held a webinar on ‘COVID 19: combating fraud in short-term financial support schemes’.

The event brought together 31 participants from 20 countries, representing labour inspectorates and other enforcement authorities, as well as European level social partners, and representatives from Eurofound, the European Commission and the European Labour Authority (ELA).

At the beginning of the 19th century, Pierre and Jean Laffite moved back and forth across fluid lines of law. Within the context of their times, pirate or outlaw behaviours might also be socially constructive entrepreneurship. Their story provides lessons for modern entrepreneurs and business ethicists working on economic frontiers.

No plan for local economic development within the larger metropolitan region of Kolkata can realistically succeed unless based on an understanding of the informal sector and taking account of it in subsequent local development strategy. The objective of this chapter is to provide a detailed look at the state of the informal sector in the larger metropolitan region of Kolkata since 1991. This information would provide a means to understand the impact of economic liberalization on the local economies of the various smaller towns/municipalities that constitute the Kolkata Metropolitan Area (KMA) and to suggest ways to incorporate the informal sector in the growth process. The study is based on aggregate-level secondary data that present trends in growth and structure of the informal sector in the KMA. The study also considers informal manufacturing activities and informal service activities , and highlights ways to include the informal sector in the local economic development process.

"This book took around a decade to write. Three of us, coming from different
locations and contexts, coming from different histories, experiences and lived
lives, coming from different intellectual traditions, shared some initial thoughts. Our sharing showed that we were confronted with a related kind of problem: what do we make of the contemporary, a contemporary marked by a certain incitement to discourse on globalization. What indeed is globalization? What do we mean by ‘global’? What do we make of ‘global capitalism’? What indeed is global capitalism? Where then is the ‘local’?
Given that Marx provided an analysis of nineteenth century European
capitalism, what conceptual handles or windows can Marx offer today? Can he offer anything? Would we at all turn to him for an understanding, interpretation and explanation of contemporary capitalism? Or would he be irrelevant in the Southern situation, given the birth of his theory in a western context? Do concepts travel? Would his concepts be relevant in another culture and another time? How do we conceptualize Marxism in the South, if at all and why at all? Could we at all conceptualize a Marxism that was turned to the South? How would we attend to the scorn of the cultural difference theorist who would say that Marxism’s western moorings impart a certain incommensurability to its invocation in non-Western realities? How would we do away with the near religio-scientific belief of the Universalist who would see the possibility of a ‘core applicability’ of Marxism transcending (non-Western) particularities? Would a rethinking of Marxian questions and concerns in the South mean a radical displacement of much of Marxism; such that Marxism becomes aboriginal —that is, both, ‘other than the original’ as also ‘singed with a certain aboriginality’?
Would it also mean a rethinking of the very description and meaning of the
South that has hitherto hegemonized us? Would it mean a rethinking of the
category of ‘third world’—third world as the representative category for any
description of the South? Taking off from questions as to why and how Marxism could matter in the context of the South, it appeared to us that both western Marxism and third world as is usually deployed in classical and conventional renditions are deeply problematic. Even the bulk of the so-called critique of modernity, whether they be postmodern or postcolonial, falter when faced with the third world. A culturalist critique would tend to forget capital; and an economistic critique is inclined towards putting aside the question of modernity. Resultantly, the specificity as also the burden of the history and the experience of colonial modernity and the evolution of (indigenous) capitalism, all of these in their overdetermined and contradictory imbrications, remain unaccounted for at a more theoretical level. This theoretical problem, by no means peculiar to Marxism, acquires additional urgency in a Marxian space since western Marxism has never really faced up to the category of third world; nor has it come face to face with the experience–language–logic–ethos of the South. Rather, it has often turned away from this encounter; such a turning away is perhaps reflective of an implicit Orientalism. Whether in the North or South, wittingly or unwittingly, irrespective of ideological dispositions, the efforts to rethink Marxism and third world in the Southern space have, with few exceptions, remained forestalled. For us therefore, the more pressing questions are related to how Marxist theory would encounter the specificity of third world. In turn, how would third world encounter Marxism? How do the understandings of Marxism and third world change because of this encounter? This book deals with these questions; it proposes in the process the inauguration of a counter concept ‘world of the third’.

This work thereafter fleshes out a description of world of the third, and of its
encounter with global capitalism, with India as the site of analysis and in the
context of the present phase of globalization. Indeed, globalization has been a recurring sub-theme in the encounter of the ‘rest’ with the West and the current phase represents another passage, with its own unique effects, of this ongoing encounter. By virtue of its unique disposition, Marxian questions tuned to world of the third enunciate a quite different trajectory of explaining and understanding this encounter.

However, one may still ask: why invent a new name world of the third? Does
a change in name solve the problem? Naming has to it a colonizing hue, especially in the South. Nobody has borne the consequences of the cultural imputations involved in naming more than the Southern people. Southern thinkers, to name a few, Franz Fanon, Che Guevara, Mahatma Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore and Krishnachandra Bhattacharya (author of Swaraj in Ideas) have struggled against the stifling grip of markers coming to their homeland like metonymic meteors from the west. For them, the purpose of social struggles, including the struggle for freedom, was never to just win political independence, but to see to it that the emerging structure–subject is free from the scourge of concepts the West deploys to describe the South (one such concept being ‘third world’). That is also to free oneself from the Orientalist grip, that merged with that of a Capital-centered view to prescribe a fixed path of modernization, progress or development for ancient civilizations. It was to be, for them, a struggle over mindsets-attitudes,
over worldviews; decolonization meant decolonization of minds; swaraj meant ‘swaraj in ideas’. That is why language (whether oral, written, practical or aesthetic) was so important to all these thinkers and resultantly their struggles became a struggle over the structure of symbolic systems as also over subjectivity. These currents of intellectual and social opposition to discourses of colonialism and then modernization including development have subsequently taken various forms and have continued to redefine the intellectual and practical landscape of social resistance and at times social reconstruction in the South. In many ways, these intellectual and social movements talk not simply to their own people, but to the West as well by pointing out that what seemed obvious to the latter was only a particular construction of the ‘rest’ by the West. They argued that the lived
experience of the South could not be reduced to the conceptual frame (explanatory or interpretative) generated in and by the West. The problem is also of reducing (cultural, economic and political) difference to frames of discrimination; it is one of organizing worlds that are different in terms of step–ladder hierarchies, where one is not different from the other, but where one is either superior or inferior to the other (in this case it is all about reducing the difference that world of the third institutes into the global to the hierarchy of first and third worlds). The problem is therefore about being sensitive to a fundamental dissonance that has appeared as a result of the encounter of the West with the ‘rest’. In this context, the deployment of world of the third (as different and as outside) against the given of third world (as the lacking inside of the first world) is crucial.

Our endeavor takes us to a provisional conclusion: the foreclosure of world
of the third is produced through a foregrounding of third world. The hegemonic (here, global capitalism) is then a product of foreclosure (here, world of the third) and foregrounding (here, third world). Critiquing western Marxism and various other strands of ‘post’ thoughts for having missed this crucial mode and node of modernist thinking that motored the conceptualization of and intervention in the so-called third world societies, we offer an interpretation of how this conceptualization of and intervention in the so-called third world societies is a process constitutive of global capitalism.

Further, by defamiliarizing and denaturalizing the given of global capitalism
and third worldism (as also development–globalization), we propose a language of resistance premised on the return of the foreclosed world of the third. Consequently, resistance to the hegemonic cannot but be founded on the return of the foreclosed, on the return not of the third world but of world of the third. A world of the third Marxian approach thus not only provides a distinctly different language/worldview for analyzing the hegemonic, but in the same turn lays down the contours of a possible world of living beyond the hegemonic.

Finally, this work is not just about a dialogue between East and West, between South and North, between the global and the local, between world of the first and world of the third but also between Marx and Freud, between Althusser and Lacan. In the process, in addition, this work brings face to face two near-incommensurable traditions—the rationalist-humanist and the psychoanalytic—and see what productive dialogue or enabling moment can emerge from such an encounter. The dialogue with Amartya Sen (and John Rawls and Martha Nussbaum) is premised on such an encounter. In that sense, this book is also about a dialogue between Sen and Marx-Freud, between need and class, between positional objectivity and overdetermination, between capabilities–functioning–freedom and alienation."

“You can tell the condition of a nation by looking at the status of its women”
- Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru
Despite having a fairly long and enlarged provisions including a host of other laws enacted by the government, the empirical reality tells a quite different story that women’s conditions and human rights situation remains gloomy and marginal. The concept of rights and human rights of women as such particularly in the realm of economic and social rights, has been markedly absent from the Indian Government’s activities and approaches to gender equality (Subramanian, 1995). Thus, women are still subdued in our society, they are still not economically emancipated. Not only developing countries even in developed countries the women are facing similar hurdles in achieving equal status to that of men (Engineer, 1992: 32-33), be it politics, administration, civil service, trade, industries, women are extremely inadequately represented.
Thus this study aims to understand the meaning of empowerment and find the relationship between women empowerment and their livelihood engagement. To be more specific does economic empowerment means overall empowerment or is there need to have a holistic view to study empowerment.

This paper evaluates critically the third-sector approach that encourages involvement in groups in order to foster community participation in deprived neighbourhoods. Analysing recent government surveys of community participation in the UK, it reveals that a culture of engagement in groups is relatively alien to most people in deprived areas, unlike one-to-one aid that is extensively used.

The poor and marginalized women in India have not just experienced the inequalities of class and gender but also of caste and religion. Since most of them are employed informally, they are further exposed to job-related insecurities. The article intends to identify these women at the bottom of the Indian society and to understand their historical and current challenges. In the first section, it explores some major intersections of inequalities and disadvantages that these women face, attempting to understand their differences and commonalities. It is found that these women predominantly belong to dalit, tribal or Muslim communities. These women face unique struggles, owing to their different community identities. These challenges and their historical background are explored in the second section of the article. In addition, they face certain common challenges owing to their gender and the informal nature of their occupation, which is addressed in the third section. The article discusses their common and unique concerns through an exploration of various theoretical frameworks and gives a comprehensive overview of the subject. It underscores that the informal employment in India cannot be addressed without fully grasping the intertwined issues of caste, religion, community or gender.

Ovaj izvještaj istražuje pokretače neprijavljenog gospodarstva u Hrvatskoj, dosadašnju organizaciju borbe protiv neprijavljenog rada i preispituje aktualni te potencijalni pristup politika i mjera u rješavanju problema neprijavljenog rada u Hrvatskoj.

Pokretači neprijavljenog gospodarstva u Hrvatskoj
Značajni je napredak nedavno postignut u objašnjavanju odrednica neprijavljenog rada.  Da bi se objasnio neprijavljeni rad, podrazumijeva se da svako društvo ima institucije koje određuju, prate i provode „pravila igre“ vezane za ono što je društveno prihvatljivo.  U svim društvima postoje dva tipa takvih institucija: formalne institucije koje određuju „državni moral“ o tome što je društveno prihvatljivo (tj. zakoni i propisi) i neformalne institucije koje određuju „građanski moral“ (tj. zajednička društvena pravila koja su najčešće nepisana). 
Gledano iz perspektive navedenih institucija neprijavljeni se rad pojavljuje kada se zbog propusta formalnih institucija državni moral počne razlikovati od građanskog.  Posljednjih godina više je studija prepoznalo o kojim se propustima formalnih institucija radi. Neprijavljeni rad prevladava kada imamo: niži BDP po glavi stanovnika; rašireniju korupciju u javnom sektoru i slabiju kvalitetu upravljanja; nisku potrošnju za intervencije na tržištu rada u svrhu pomoći najranjivijim skupinama; niska izdavanja za socijalnu zaštitu i sustave socijalnih transfera koji su neučinkoviti u smanjivanju razine nejednakosti i teške materijalne deprivacije. 
Stoga, da bi se riješio problem neprijavljenog gospodarstva u Hrvatskoj potrebno je nastaviti sa sljedećim mjerama:
• poboljšati razinu BDP-a po glavi stanovnika,
• poboljšati upravljanje i smanjiti korupciju u javnom sektoru,
• održati i povećati potrošnju za intervencije na tržištu rada u svrhu pomoći najranjivijim skupinama sa aktualne niske, relativno osnovne razine,
• ustrajati na povećanju izdavanja za socijalnu zaštitu, i to povezati s 
• razvijanjem učinkovitijih sustava socijalnih transfera koji smanjuju razinu nejednakosti u prihodima i razinu teške materijalne deprivacije u hrvatskom društvu.
Pored navedenih strukturnih odrednica, postoje mnoge dodatne organizacijske i političke inicijative koje se mogu poduzimati u rješavanju problema neprijavljenog gospodarstva. 

Organizacija borbe protiv neprijavljenog rada: institucionalni okvir
Hrvatska nema nijednu agenciju zaduženu za borbu protiv neprijavljenog rada, ni središnje tijelo koje bi osiguralo koordinirano djelovanje različitih sektora uključenih u rješavanje problema neprijavljenog rada. Umjesto toga, postoji pristup koji je vrlo fragmentaran. Nadležnost za rješavanje neprijavljenog rada raspoređena je po cijelom nizu institucija od kojih svaka preuzima odgovornost za različite segmente neprijavljenog gospodarstva. Dok je kršenje radnog prava u nadležnosti Inspektorata rada, neplaćanje poreza u nadležnosti je Ministarstva financija, a prijevare u osiguranju i socijalnom osiguranju su u nadležnosti tijela socijalnog osiguranja. Trenutačno je suradnja između različitih institucija u borbi protiv neprijavljenog rada nedostatna u strateškom i operativnom smislu i u smislu dijeljenja podataka te ne postoje zajednički tematski ciljevi. Stoga je potrebno unaprijediti kvalitetu upravljanja. Potrebna je reakcija koja je više koordinirana, a taj problem će se dijelom riješiti odlukom kojom se krajem 2017. godine osniva Državni inspektorat.
Uključenost socijalnih partnera u rješavanju problema neprijavljenog rada za sada je relativno slaba a njihovo sudjelovanje u procesu donošenja odluka zanemarivo je. S obzirom na to da rješavanje problema neprijavljenog rada zahtjeva njihovo sudjelovanje, preporuča se njihovo intenzivnije uključivanje. 

Aktualni pristup politika i mjera: evaluacija
Hrvatska trenutno ima relativno suženi pristup odvraćanja i mjere politika su uvelike usredotočene na odvraćanje sudjelovanja u neprijavljenom radu povećavanjem kazni i rizika od otkrivanje. Malo se pažnje posvećuje poboljšanju prednosti i poticaja prijavljenog rada, ili čak neizravnim preventivnim alatima kao što su kampanje za podizanje svijesti i rješavanja nepravilnosti i propusta formalnih institucija (npr. osiguravanje proceduralne i redistributivne pravednosti i pravičnosti te provođenje sveobuhvatnih ekonomskih i socijalnih politika). Stoga je potrebno odmaknuti se od pretjeranog oslanjanja na mjere odvraćanja prema široj primjeni preventivnih poticaja kao i prema podizanju svijesti, i usredotočiti se na ciljanje i rješavanje najvećih pokretača neprijavljenog gospodarstva.
 

This paper looks at the substantial role of informal traders in ensuring food security, and other economic and social goods in South Africa and how they have been impacted by Covid-19 and responses to it. The state responses have reflected a continued undervaluing and undermining of this sector to the detriment of the traders themselves, their suppliers, and their customers. There is a need for a new valuing of the sector that would recognise and build on its mode of ordering and key contributions to society. This needs to include: shifting the narrative about the actors involved and challenging the concept of “informal”; planning and regulating to ensure more space for owner-operated small-scale food retailers; and putting in place a social-safety net to support them in times of crisis.

What kinds of governance agendas emerge at frontiers of commercial expansion, where routine economic relations traverse differences of ethnicity and degrees of formality? In the Balim Valley in the highlands of Indonesia's easternmost Papua province, mobilities and trade intersect at adjoining peri-urban markets and minivan terminals. The 'terminal economy' at the edges of Wamena, the region's bustling hub, is a threshold between rural and urban life, where indigenous livelihoods are subordinated to Indonesia's expanding commercial networks. Here, a cosmopolitan population-including indigenous Papuan highlanders and newcomer merchants from distant Indonesian regions-gathers to buy and sell local horticultural produce and imported commodities, transit between modes of transportation, and engage in a variety of formal and informal economic activities. This article traces the emergence of a multifaceted commercial regulation agenda, in the wake of demands for the recognition of indigenous contributions to the regional economy. It considers recent indigenous-formulated regulation policies in the context of the region's commercial history, one that is marked by a colonial devaluation of indigenous economic life and, more recently, by uprisings, inter-ethnic tensions, and government attempts to control and contain informal vending. The article conceptualizes commercial regulation as a convergence between efforts to contain disruption and demands for the revaluation of marginalized economic practices. It argues that commercial regulation is especially salient in regions that have been relegated to an end-point position in national and global commodity distribution paths.
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Since the establishment of ISO 26000, which is the international standard for social responsibility, companies around the world have increased their focus on corporate social responsibility (CSR) and on how their actions, products and services affect society. CSR is often seen as an extension of corporate communication but it is not always practised as such, and where it is, it may not always be practised according to the principles inherent in the standard. The objective of this study was to identify the span of the communicated ideas -the range of predominant beliefs -on the labour dimension of CSR in Peru. Q-methodology was used to identify four dominant perceptions on the topic. A significant finding of the study was that while there was consensus on the need to address specific issues of Peruvian labour, CSR, particularly CSR as an instrument of corporate communication, was not held up as the vehicle with which to do so.

All UNESCO urban World Heritage sites are strictly regulated. In Antigua, Guatemala, this includes building façades and streets, as well as the use of public places. Homeowners and building owners, however, challenge regulations by using unapproved paints, signs, and building materials. Residents modify building façades to accommodate cars and open walls to effectively blend home-based businesses with the street. At the same time, street vendors contest regulated public spaces by behaving inappropriately by selling goods on public streets rather than designated marketplaces. Rather than conceive of property owners and vendors behavior as outside and in contrast to the building and street vending regulations, I reframe their actions within what I am calling urban spatial permissiveness, a concept I derive from Roy's (2004) theory of the unmapping-flexible regulation-of urban space. Antigua offers an ethnographic setting that shows how regulations are not always rigidly enforced but are negotiated to deal with everyday contingencies that relate to residents' and vendors' rights to the city (Harvey 2008). By way of conclusion I consider Foucault's concept of governmentality as a negotiated process, in order to argue that relationships between building regulations and public space usage reveal the limits of legality and strict enforcement policies.

With the support of local and international organisations, the municipality of Quito, Ecuador, relocated approximately 6000 street vendors from the streets to eleven Popular Commercial Centres. The research examines the extent to which formalisation has altered their working and living conditions from the perspective of the decent work framework. Fieldwork was carried out in one of the commercial centres through surveys and interviews with the relocated vendors, representatives of their associations, and local government officials. The study found that it is not obvious that the working and living conditions will automatically improve with formalisation. While some aspects have improved (i.e. labour, employment, work and skills use and upgrading), others have worsened (i.e. jobs, income and representation).

Recent archaeological studies have highlighted the sociability of drinking spaces as a means to better understand quotidian activities of non-elites. Through research conducted at Smuttynose Island, in the Isles of Shoals, Maine, I illustrate an often-overlooked narrative of the Atlantic World, and especially colonial North America – the daily life of individuals working within frontier resource extraction communities. Further, I argue that such communities and their assemblages fall within a continuum which places cosmopolitan city-centers on one end and rural settlements on the other.

Trade in marketplaces is central to the domestic distribution of food and other goods throughout the developing world. The commodity networks involved are often complex with numerous intermediate transactions between producer and consumer. By contrast, in the Pacific nation of Papua New Guinea (PNG), marketplace trade has historically occurred through very short commodity networks. This article examines the appearance and growing significance of intermediary trading in PNG's marketplaces and associated trade networks. Reselling is supporting urban livelihoods at a time when making a living in town is increasingly precarious, but the transformation of marketplaces, I argue, also threatens to reduce the agency of rural producers and erode the incomes of certain producers. Growing intermediation may also see men increasingly involved in an economic domain where women have been central. The emergence of intermediaries is globally an important historical development, and this article provides a rare study of this process within the contemporary era. K E Y W O R D S commodity networks, intermediaries and middlemen, marketplace, Papua New Guinea, rural-urban relations, trade

Local Exchange Trading Schemes (LETS) are networks for exchanging goods and services using a local currency. They are seen by some as providing an `alternative' way of negotiating changing and complex livelihoods. Current literature on LETS and work understands participation as a response to dissatisfaction around work and as a strategy for re-valuing work. In this paper we draw initially on new quantitative data to understand who engages in LETS work and find that trading is small-scale and limited to a particular group of people. The data also suggest that contrary to previous research exchanges on LETS sometimes transform and sometimes reinforce existing work relations. To illuminate these complexities we draw on in-depth interviews with Stroud and Brixton LETS members. First, we highlight the multiple ways in which their relations to work connect with their motivations for joining LETS. Second, we examine how these motivations are translated into practice by looking at how prices for LETS work are negotiated. This illustrates that the way power interweaves during these negotiations is multiple and dynamic. Finally, we suggest that for LETS trading to be more equal, the different capacities that people have to negotiate needs to be considered.

A growing literature demonstrates the significance of aesthetics within processes of world-class city making, as decisions about who gets to live and work in the city are increasingly made on the basis of codes of appearance. However, less attention has been paid to how such codes are (re)produced and (re)directed by informal workers and their organisations in everyday practice. Drawing upon a multisided ethnography in Kampala and Delhi, this paper explores the ways in which market vendors and waste collectors have responded to the proliferation of three aesthetic technologies: the identity card, the uniform, and the code of conduct. We show that workers have appropriated these technologies in creative ways in order to defend their livelihoods against the threat of displacement. However, this act of appropriation has come at the cost of the exclusion of the more vulnerable workers, who now find their activities policed not only by the state but also by a range of non-state organisations. These findings contribute to debates on labour organisation and world-class city making by demonstrating the ways in which aesthetic rationalities emerge through an encounter with the tactics of everyday life.

This chapter focuses on informal trafficking of daily consumption goods between Israel and the West Bank since the redeployments of the Palestinian Authority’s security forces in summer 2007. Through the study of these traffics and the strategies of the actors who organize them, we first assess the capacity of the Palestinian Authority to territorialize its control over Palestinian autonomous enclaves. Second, through the analysis of the content of these informal transactions, we intend to grasp the new forms of economic regulations that emerge, beyond formal exchanges, between the Palestinian economy and the Israeli economy.

Ce chapitre analyse l’évolution des trafics informels de biens de consommation courante entre Israël et la Cisjordanie depuis les redéploiements des forces de sécurité de l’Autorité palestinienne supervisés par le Général Dayton au cours de l’été 2007. A partir de l’examen de ces trafics et des stratégies développées par leurs promoteurs, il évaluera d’abord la capacité de l’Autorité palestinienne à territorialiser son contrôle dans les enclaves palestiniennes. L’étude de l’évolution du contenu de ces transactions permettra ensuite de cerner les nouvelles formes de régulation qui émergent entre l’économie israélienne et palestinienne, au-delà des échanges formels.

Radical feminist analyses have always placed considerable emphasis on the crucial role played by social reproduction for the development of capitalism. Early social reproduction analyses – primarily premised on housework but also more broadly concerned with wagelessness – developed a robust critique of Marxian views that identified processes of value-generation only with the productive sphere, and de facto deployed ‘productive’ and ‘paid’ labour as synonyms.1 Some more recent approaches, by contrast, propose social reproduction as a ‘theory’ (SRT), and deploy the concept in order to focus on how labour is regenerated daily and inter-generationally through private and public institutions in contemporary contexts.2 This second set of studies seem concerned with analysing the circuits of care that reproduce the worker as connected yet distinct to those of capital and value-generation. At the same time, however, they are committed to avoiding what they consider ‘dual theories’, conceptu...

To tackle undeclared work, a voluntary disclosure initiative was implemented for a 6-month period in 2019 to enable those voluntarily disclosing to the Lithuanian State Tax Inspectorate (STI) their past undeclared work to have the penalties waived that would have applied if they are compliant in the future. The outcome was that 42 million euros extra tax was collected.

To advance understanding of the reasons for informal sector entrepreneurship, this article evaluates the determinants of cross-country variations in the extent to which enterprises are unregistered when they start operating. Reporting the World Bank Enterprise Survey data on 67,515 enterprises across 142 countries, the finding is that one in five (19.9%) of the formal enterprises surveyed started-up unregistered, although this varies from all enterprises surveyed in some countries (e.g. Pakistan) to 1% of surveyed enterprises in Slovakia. To explain these cross-country variations, four competing theories are evaluated which variously assert that nonregistration is determined by either: economic under-development and poorer quality governance (modernization theory); too much state interference (neoliberal theory); too little state intervention (political economy theory); or an incongruence between the laws and rules of formal institutions and the beliefs, values, and norms of informa...

Es lo de siempre. En las situaciones de crisis, lo más fácil, tanto para los poderes como para las mayorías sociales, es dirigir el foco acusador a los sectores más frágiles de la sociedad, que han de ver cómo a los abusos que sufren se le añade el de aparecer como responsables del mismo desorden social del que son al tiempo víctimas y producto. En una ciudad como Barcelona, maltratada por la masificación turística, por el encarecimiento de todo, por el ruido y la contaminación, por la inaccesibilidad de la vivienda…, parece ser que uno de nuestros grandes problemas es el de los vendedores ambulantes y su escandalosa manera de ganarse la vida. Evocando el primer largometraje de François Truffaut —Tirez sur le pianiste!—, bien podríamos decir que la consigna urgente en estos momentos es “¡Tirad sobre el mantero!”. El mantero es, en efecto, el blanco perfecto.

The informal economy is an important part of urban economies in the global South. Almost half of Colombia's working population relies on the informal economy to obtain income. This study examined street vendors in downtown Cali, Colombia. A recent survey of 527 street vendors provides the basis for a detailed analysis of who works as street vendors, how much they earn, aspirations and perceptions of their work, and how closely they resemble the rest of the working population. The presented data also show the links between this sector and the formal economy. Connections between people working in this sector and the State were also examined, and welfare payment flows from the State to the sector were revealed. This study shows how the informal sector is closely tied to the formal economy and the State's welfare functions.

What happens to informal institutions and practices when political actors decide to implement democratic institutional reforms aimed at relieving formal institutions of informal constraints? Does informality disappear, or do the elites and affected populations continue to apply and abide by informal rules? What do we know about the relationship between institutional reforms and informal institutions? This book seeks to improve our understanding of how, when, and under which conditions democratic institutional reforms affect informal institutions and practices in countries transitioning to democracy, also known as hybrid regimes. With an empirical focus on three transitional post-Soviet regimes—Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine—this book aims to explain the contentious relationship between democratic institutional reforms and informality in the broader post-Soviet context. These findings have implications not only for hybrid regimes, but also for the majority of other post-Soviet, as well as other post-communist, countries. This book engages with a large and growing body of literature on informal institutions and practices and offers theoretical insights relevant to comparative politics, democratization and institutional development studies, political sociology, human geography and political economy.

Since 2015, Egyptian government has announced several initiatives to integrate the informal economy into the country's formal economy. To achieve this goal, five-year tax breaks as well other incentives have been declared by government officials more than once during this period.

Purpose -Naples, Italy in the last decade has become a destination for Ukrainian migrants escaping the economic uncertainty of their homeland. A sign of the city's importance in the diaspora is that the Ukrainian government in 2008 opened a local consulate. Estimates are that nearly a million Ukrainians have used Italy as a point of labour transit, even if only a fifth of those are formally registered. The purpose of this paper is to examine the strategies with which Ukrainian migrants in Naples, Italy attempt to create ontological security in the context of informal economies and the uncertainties of the migratory process. Design/methodology/approach -The research is based on 18 months of ethnographic close observation and participation in migrant networks in Naples between 2004 and 2008. Findings -The research reveals the strategies used by Ukrainian migrants to arrange and maintain transnational connections, seek work, and develop a sense of belonging through place-making and institutional development in the face of the significant barriers to inclusion and socio-economic stability in Neapolitan society. Practical implications -The evidence suggests that policymakers concerned with social cohesion and integration might wish to consider informal economic activities not simply as a "problem" to resolve but a key feature of contemporary capitalism that may create the conditions to address their concerns. Therefore, a more nuanced understanding of how migrants create their lives through these activities would be useful. Originality/value -This ethnographic material suggests that greater attention should be paid to the creative capacities of migrants to create a sense of security through informal activities. Migrants make extensive use of social networks and knowledge distribution to form the basis of decisions about economic behaviour, emplacement and ontological security.

The City of Johannesburg wants to introduce a R50 recycling levy so that residents would pay for the expansion of a pilot separation at source (S@S) project that pays private companies to collect recyclables. The pilot has been expensive, ineffective, dispossessed reclaimers, and worsened their incomes and working conditions. Reclaimers and residents are opposing the levy and calling on the City to adopt a recycling system that is developed with reclaimers and led by them.

https://theconversation.com/johannesburg-is-threatening-to-sideline-informal-waste-pickers-why-its-a-bad-idea-159969

There are millions of ‘‘subsistence’’ entrepreneurs around the world, located primarily in developing countries, engaging in micro
enterprise to eke out a survival living when other labor market options become unavailable. However, the vast majority of them
are trapped in a ‘‘survival and maintenance’’ cycle. This article focuses on a phenomenon involving a subset of subsistence
entrepreneurs who do manage to thrive and grow their enterprise. We label the phenomenon ‘‘transformative subsistence entrepreneurship,’’ reflecting (1) significant positive change in their personal, social and economic well-being, and (2) significant positive influence on their immediate communities. Drawing on 18 in-depth qualitative interviews, we show how the phenomenon plays out and how transformative subsistence entrepreneurs carry out vital marketing activities in their local exchange contexts, rising
above substantial life challenges and end up improving the economic capacities of their communities as well. We contend that the contributions of a network of such transformative subsistence entrepreneurs, each seen at a micro enterprise level of analysis, can accumulate and coalesce to emerge as the backbone of the informal economy at a macroeconomic level.

Urbanization is driving Southeast Asia’s economies, moving vast numbers of people to urban centers at a pace unheard of in the West. As impressive as these cities are, they bring with them massive problems in terms of sanitation, pollution, income disparity and infrastructure challenges. If the region is to enjoy the benefits of urbanization it will have to balance the old and new, taking advantage of both traditional knowledge and modern technology, writes Bharat Dahiya.

"When I Wear My Alligator Boots examines how the lives of dispossessed men and women are affected by the rise of narcotrafficking along the U.S.-Mexico border. In particular, the book explores a crucial tension at the heart of the “war on drugs”: despite the violence and suffering brought on by drug cartels, for the rural poor in Mexico’s north, narcotrafficking offers one of the few paths to upward mobility and is a powerful source of cultural meanings and local prestige.

In the borderlands, traces of the drug trade are everywhere: from gang violence in cities to drug addiction in rural villages, from the vibrant folklore popularized in the narco-corridos of Norteña music to the icon of Jesús Malverde, the “patron saint” of narcos, tucked beneath the shirts of local people. In When I Wear My Alligator Boots, the author explores the everyday reality of the drug trade by living alongside its low-level workers, who live at the edges of the violence generated by the militarization of the war on drugs. Rather than telling the story of the powerful cartel leaders, the book focuses on the women who occasionally make their sandwiches, the low-level businessmen who launder their money, the addicts who consume their products, the mules who carry their money and drugs across borders, and the men and women who serve out prison sentences when their bosses' operations go awry."

Drawn from grounded perspectives of a Bangkok night market that is part of a franchise known as "Talad Rod Fai" (or "Train Station Market"), this article argues that the market's popularity rested originally on its liminoid character, enabling the construction of an alternate public space that can be transgressive of the city's highly urbanized landscape. Its long-term sustainability, however, appears to be at the cost of its original objectives, due to the onset of global tourism, which has increasingly converted and transformed its spaces into a site of commercialization and formalization. This has impacted the nature of the goods and products sold, and contributed to the growing precarity of many of its tenants, along with significant loss of local interest in the market. Such insights raise implications about the potentially contradictory nature of tourism on local street-level economies, and its impact on the construction and subsequent consumption of public spaces in urban settings.

Urinboyev, R., 2017. Migration and Transnational Informality in Post-Soviet Societies: Ethnographic Study of ‘Po rukam’ Experiences of Uzbek Migrant Workers in Moscow. In: A.-L. Heusala and K. Aitamurto, eds. Migrant Workers in Russia: Global Challenges of the Shadow Economy in Societal Transformation. London: Routledge (forthcoming), 70–93.

In the last decades, the occupation of the pedestrian routes and in general of the public space in the city center of Cali Colombia, have been evidencing diverse phenomena, which to a great extent respond to the accelerated growth of the urban population, where the migrations that have occurred in the interior of the country (fruit of the social conflicts of the last decades), have particularly marked the realities. In Cali, on 10th and 15th streets, near the Government Building, the Palace of Justice and the Municipal Administrative Center-CAM, the public space in general terms has been stressed in a particular way, which has generated conflicts in the surfaces designed for the pedestrians, since they are occupied by vendors in the midst of the informality routines, forcing the pedestrian to use the automobile tracks being a notorious and interesting phenomenon, when observing the factors that produce it and using them as parameters in the design of architectural spaces that contribute to improvement.

This article evaluates critically the competing explanations for the persistence and growth of informal employment in contemporary societies. These interpret the normality of informality either through a structuralist lens as arising out of "exclusion" from state benefits and the circuits of the modern economy or through a neoliberal and/or post-structuralist lens as driven by the voluntary "exit" of workers out of formal institutions and into this alternative realm. To evaluate critically the validity of these competing explanations, this article reports a 2005/6 survey of informal employment in postsocialist Ukraine. Analyzing the results of 600 face-to-face interviews, the finding is that either/or explanations need to be transcended. Informal employment is neither universally driven by exclusion nor exit. Instead, some participate mostly due to exclusion, others mostly for exit rationales, and some for a combination of the two, with different mixtures across different populations and types of informal employment. The outcome is a call to move towards more contextbound understandings of the pervasiveness of informality through

Community-based tourism (CBT) offers both opportunities and challenges in the quest
for holistic community development. The evolution and development of CBT projects
can follow different trajectories. This conceptual paper’s main contribution is the
formulation of a comprehensive model of the development of CBT. The model
suggests that CBT projects can be initiated from within and outside the community by
the private, public and non-governmental sectors or a combination of these using a topdown
or bottom-up approach. It also posits that CBT projects can take a formal or
informal character depending on the conditions leading to their initiation. The paper
highlights the benefits and constraints to the scaling up or down of operations linked to
informality. It supports further research in analyzing the various aspects associated
with the shift from formality to the informality of CBT projects and vice versa and the
relationship with CBT development and holistic community development.

Over the past four decades, information technology (IT) has had a profound e!ect on the US economy, resulting in a shift from a manufacturing to an information economy. This e!ect, however, has also produced what may be labeled the paradox of IT productivity. While the percentage of a "rm's budget spent on IT continues to increase, there is increasing evidence that "rms fail to obtain the bene"ts of these expenditures within the anticipated time frame. The reason for delays in obtaining the bene"ts is due to management's failure to strategically leverage the full potential of IT and their failure to overcome resistance to change. These problems are discussed in depth and solutions for them are suggested.