Secteur informel et la marche du travail en Afrique noire francophone

The authors re-assess the informal sector in French-speaking Africa. They first look at the classical interpretations of how the informal sector is perceived in the context of development: as a result of international capitalism or as a correction to an unbalanced development. They situate the informal sector in an environment, where development takes place at two paces: the direct transfer of modern institutions and ways of production is instant, but affects only a minority, wheras the majority evolves at a much slower pace, digesting the new and combining it with the traditional. Thus, the informal sector has elements of both the old and the new. This approach leads to a disaggregation of the economy in more than two sectors, and a typology of the informal sector with more or less dynamic subsectors. The paper further discusses the heterogeneity of informal sector labour and the variability of the incomes it generates, the partial mobility of labour between the modern sector and the informal sector, and the obstacles to this mobility.