Stuart Henry

Issues and Prospects for the Study of Informal Economies: Concepts, Research Strategies, and Policy:

This article considers the current state of knowledge about informal economies. Criticism of the value of the informal economy concept is addressed by considering the multiple disciplinary interests in the topic, the confusion over an appropriate definition, and the problems of classification and explanation. A multidisciplinary, macro-micro approach is suggested. The joint ethnography-sruvey method has been found to be the most productive research tool for empirical study, and the principles of such methodology are outlined. In the context of a discussion on the politics of research funding, major areas for future research are identified. These include historical surveys; local-area studies; changing household work patterns in relation to the wider formal economy; informal work and illegal markets; class, ethnic, and sexual composition of the participants; informal institutions, particularly information and skill exchanges; media and their representation of the informal economy; and the role of informal economies in coping with national disasters. Finally, the implications of the informal economies for government policy on taxation, labor, welfare, and crime and criminal justice are drawn out.

Guerrilla economics and the wild economy

This paper assesses the latest contributions, by Harding and Jenkins and by Portes, Castells and Benton, to the literature on the informal or hidden economy. It places these works in the context of the now significant body of theoretical and empirical research that has developed over the past 17 years. It traces the emergence of the concept from its roots in economic anthropology, developmental studies, criminology, poverty studies, industrial and urban sociology, and Soviet studies, to its current demand for an interdisciplinary economics. It shows how, what was originally a fragmented polemical critique of the classical model of economic man, dismissed by many as peripheral, even trivial, has emerged as a new approach to the analysis of economic life. This guerrilla interdisciplinary irreverence is forcing a new dialectical vision in which economic life is reveled to be anything but the predictable, rational activity of market forces. Instead we see a wild economy, of formal and informal, market and non-market, as interrelated dimensions of the same whole, a whole permeated by social networks and clusters of workers. Failure to take this development seriously is to be blind to the realities of modern economic life and itself constitutive of the myth that is the formal economy. *** DIRECT SUPPORT *** AW502012 00002