James Overton

Academic populists, the informal economy and those benevolent merchants: Politics and income security reform in Newfoundland

Academic populists in Newfoundland are wont to celebrate the informal economy and even the system of merchant credit in the country — and, after 1949, Canadian province — as a kind of proto‐welfare state. Now, in an era of crisis in the fishing industry, mass unemployment and state retreat from responsibility for providing support for the poor and unemployed, the putative value of the old ‘moral economy’ of rural Newfoundland is being rediscovered by those who are promoting social policy reform. Their argument is that we should look to the informal economy to provide a degree of security for people in a future of diminished state support. This article outlines a critique of the populists which is theoretical, empirical and political.

Peasants on the internet? Informalization in a global economy

Considered here is an increasingly influential approach, associated mainly with the work of Keith Hart, to the informal sector economy worldwide. His view is that the trend towards informalization is liberating, an economically empowering method whereby the urban and rural poor avoid state regulation, taxation and control. For this reason, Hart regards the new technology embodied in the internet as a means of realizing the autonomous community implied in informal sector economic activity; both combine to give expression to an authentic form of grassroots political democracy. Against this view it is argued that the new technology emancipates only the bourgeoisie, and that it is the urban and rural poor who suffer most from a decline in the capacity of the state to regulate and tax capital. The Memory Bank: Money in an Unequal World, by Keith Hart. London: Profile Books, 2000. Pp.320. £20 (paperback) ISBN 1861972083