Developing Economies and the Informal Sector in Historical Perspective

Chris Gerry

The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 1987, vol. 493, issue 1, 100-119

Abstract: In the 1970s, social scientists used the term “informal economy†to describe the economic survival strategies of many of the working poor in Third World cities. Now, both terminology and analysis are applied in the advanced, industrialized countries to the often proliferating variations in nonwage employment that have emerged during the world recession of the late 1970s and 1980s. In this article, social science's understanding of the relationship between the informal economy and socioeconomic development is traced back to the early nineteenth century. It is argued that this interest has tended to wax and wane according to the cycle of boom and slump in national and international economy alike. It is in this broader historical context that the policies and reality of small-scale informal economic activity in the Third World can best be elucidated.

Date: 1987
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0002716287493001008 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:anname:v:493:y:1987:i:1:p:100-119

DOI: 10.1177/0002716287493001008

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().