Geography Reference
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informalisation promoted by governments and
employers has been matched by a 'bottom-up'
informalisation stemming from the need for
retrenched formal sector workers and newcomers
to the labour market to create their own sources
of earnings and/or to avoid the punitive costs
attached to legal status. Indeed, it is noteworthy
that middle-class as well as poor households are
increasingly having to turn to informal sector
activities in order to protect incomes and
consumption (see Lozano 1997).
rates throughout most of the developing world
during the 1960s and 1970s, and in part the
outcome of increased female labour force
participation. Indeed, the saturation of the
informal sector is often argued to have hit women
the hardest given their disproportionate
concentration in the sector and the fact that their
limited skills and resources confine them to the
lowest tiers of informal activity (see Bromley 1997;
Moser 1998; Scott 1994; see also Table 38.3). In
Costa Rica, for example, where 41 per cent of the
informal workforce is female, low-income women
in the northwest province of Guanacaste complain
that their limited skills and capital restrict them to
petty/part-time ventures such as selling home-
made sweets, flavoured ices and pastries outside
local schools or on the streets (Chant 1994b).
Moreover, since most of their neighbours are
forced into the same kind of business, competition
is so intense that some abandon the attempt
altogether, thereby adding to what is commonly
referred to as the 'discouraged worker' effect
(Baden 1993: p. 13). Recognising that the trading
of basic goods may be one of the few options open
to poor women, it is important to note that this
has been further threatened by a range of macro-
economic policies associated with structural
adjustment such as tightened control on credit, the
lifting of food subsidies, and greater influxes of
imported convenience foods stemming from trade
and currency liberalisation (Manuh 1994; Tinker
1997).
THE BEHAVIOUR OF THE INFORMAL
SECTOR DURING RECESSION AND
RESTRUCTURING
In light of the above, it is hardly surprising that
the informal sector has become increasingly
competitive during the last two decades. As
Miraftab (1994: p. 468) argues with reference to
Mexico: 'Poor people have had to concentrate
their daily activities with much greater intensity
around the issue of survival. This has implied not
only longer hours of work, but also the need to be
extremely innovative to earn a living at the edges
of the urban economy' (see also Escobar Latapí
and González de la Rocha 1995). Indeed,
although ever more creative strategies to generate
income can be witnessed in both the streets and
houses of third world cities, competition is such
that, according to ILO figures for Latin America
and the Caribbean, there was a 42 per cent drop
in income in the informal sector between 1980
and 1989 (Moghadam 1995: pp. 122-3). By the
same token, it is important to bear in mind that
informal incomes may have been better protected
than formal sector wages in view of declining
demand for imports in favour of cheap food items
and locally produced basic consumer goods (see
Vandemoortele (1991) on sub-Saharan Africa).
Nonetheless, limits to the continued expansion
of informal sector employment arise from lower
purchasing power among the population in
general and greater numbers of people needing to
work (Roberts 1991: p. 135). The latter is in part
the legacy of high fertility and declining mortality
GENDER AND THE INFORMAL
SECTOR: INFORMALISATION AND
THE 'FEMINISATION' OF LABOUR
Although, as indicated by Table 38.3, the informal
sector is by no means a 'female sector (Scott 1990),
rises in informal employment in recent decades
have been linked to a phenomenon commonly
referred to as the 'global feminisation of labour'
(Standing 1989). Indeed, bearing in mind that
women's economic activities often fall outside the
net of official data collection because of their
informal and/or part-time nature, in all regions
