Urban Informal Sector

This landmark volume brings together leading scholars in the field to investigate recent conceptual shifts, research findings and policy debates on the informal economy as well as future challenges and directions for research and policy. Well over half of the global workforce and the vast majority of the workforce in developing countries work in the informal economy, and in countries around the world new forms of informal employment are emerging. Yet the informal workforce is not well understood, remains undervalued and is widely stigmatised. Contributors to the volume bridge a range of disciplinary perspectives including anthropology, development economics, law, political science, social policy, sociology, statistics, urban planning and design. The Informal Economy Revisited also focuses on specific groups of informal workers, including home-based workers, street vendors and waste pickers, to provide a grounded insight into disciplinary debates. Ultimately, the book calls for a paradigm shift in how the informal economy is perceived to reflect the realities of informal work in the Global South, as well as the informal practices of the state and capital, not just labour. The Informal Economy Revisited is the culmination of 20 years of pioneering work by WIEGO (Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing), a global network of researchers, development practitioners and organisations of informal workers in 90 countries. Researchers, practitioners, policy-makers and advocates will all find this book an invaluable guide to the significance and complexities of the informal economy, and its role in today’s globalised economy. The Open Access version of this book, available at https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9780429200724, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license

An annotated bibliography which brings together about 240 recent titles on the urban informal sector in Asia, an area of high employment and rapid growth. Arranged thematically, it covers training, women, labour market, urban poverty, working conditions and economic growth.

Study with special reference to Jaipur, India.

The Urban Informal Sector is a collection of papers presented at a multi-disciplinary conference on ""The urban informal sector in the Third World,"" organized by the Developing Areas Study Group of the Institute of British Geographers in London on March 19, 1977. Contributors offer critical perspectives on the urban informal sector, with emphasis on employment and housing policies. Topics covered range from general reviews and national case studies to detailed studies of particular occupations in individual cities. This book is comprised of 12 chapters and begins by reviewing the relevance of dualist models of economic activities and enterprises, as applied to Third World countries, concentrating on the origins, diffusion, and deficiencies of the formal/informal dualist classification. Subsequent chapters explore the informal sector debate in studies of Third World poverty and employment; the nature of informal-formal sector relationships; the structure of the labor markets in the ""organized"" and ""unorganized"" sectors of urban economies in South India; and the problem of urban poverty, its relation to employment, and rising spatial inequalities in Brazil. Capitalist and petty commodity production in Nigeria is also discussed, along with John Turner's views on housing policy. The final chapter looks at the competition between the informal and formal sectors in the retail industry in Santiago, Chile. This monograph will be of interest to social and economic policymakers.