The conventional portrayal of the formal/informal economy dichotomy endows the formal economy with positive attributes and the informal economy with negative characteristics. Recently, this hierarchy has been inverted by scholars portraying the informal economy positively as a chosen alternative and path to progress. This paper evaluates critically this emergent representation. Reporting a study of the informal economy in the Ukraine conducted in 2005/2006, a diverse array of informal economic practices are identified that amongst some groups represent an involuntary means of livelihood but amongst others a chosen alternative and some of which seem beneficial and others deleterious to economic development and social cohesion. The outcome is a call to transcend simplistic binary hierarchical depictions of the formal economy as “bad”/informal economy as “good” (or the inverse) and towards a finer-grained and more nuanced understanding of the diverse forms of informal work and their varying consequences for economic development and social cohesion.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version under "Related research" (further below) or search for a different version of it.