Explaining and tackling the informal economy: an evaluation of competing perspectives
This paper provides an evidence-based evaluation of the competing ways of explaining and tackling the informal economy. Conventionally, participants have been viewed as rational economic actors who engage in the … Continue reading
Reappropriating Public Space in Nanchang, China: A Study of Informal Street Vendors
Since China’s shift to market socialism, many marginalized by this process work as informal street vendors where they reappropriate public space in order to survive―a practice at odds with urban … Continue reading
What’s in a Word? The Conceptual Politics of ‘Informal’ Street Trade in Dar es Salaam
Focussing on policies towards urban street trade in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, in this paper I illustrate how despite the widely acknowledged limits to its analytical usefulness, the contested and … Continue reading
Formalising the formal economy in Argentina
The study of Argentina mainly covers the period 2003 to 2016. Within that period, the use of social dialogue to address the informal economy resulted in a 1440 per cent increase of … Continue reading
On the Ways of Knowing and Understanding Informality
In the mainstream international development discourse, one often finds a general dualistic outlook in classifying the concept of (urban) informality, seen to be strikingly different from the formal, regulated economic … Continue reading
Informal economies around the world
This paper aims to present a comprehensive survey of the literature on the economics of informality. First, we focus on studies that aim to provide measures of informality using different … Continue reading
The Informal Economy as a Catalyst for Sustainability
Sustainability typically involves the balancing of three major factors: the economy, the environment, and some notion of equity. Though the economy is already a key aspect, the recognition of the … Continue reading
