Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
born of people's own initiatives.' Testifying to the
power of struggles 'from below' is the fact that the
informal sector has survived so well through nearly
two decades of severe economic crisis in developing
regions. In the decades to come, therefore,
governments in the South might well be advised to
structure their economic and employment policies
with respect to two guiding principles. The first is to
protect workers from the worst excesses of
informality. The second is to foster those elements
characterising indigenous micro-enterprises that
have contributed to buoyancy and resistance in the
face of what might be regarded as misguided state
allegiance to an increasingly untenable Western
model of economic development.
Adjustment.
Geneva: International Labour
Organisation. A collection of papers that examine the
impacts of economic restructuring on the growth of
the informal sector and the 'informalisation' of
labour arrangements in large firms in a range of
European and developing countries.
J.J.Thomas (1995)
Surviving in the City: The Urban
Informal Sector in Latin America.
London: Pluto. A
thorough account of the nature and behaviour of
the informal sector of employment in Latin
American cities. It traces the history of
conceptualisations of informal sector activity, the
growth of informal employment in the wake of
urban growth, the debt crisis and economic
restructuring, and the underpinnings and
implications of different policy interventions.
I.Tinker (1997)
Street Foods: Urban Food and
Employment in Developing Countries.
New York/
Oxford: Oxford University Press. The selling of
foodstuffs in the street occupies up to one-tenth of
male and female workers in developing countries.
Based on a study organised by the Equity Policy
Center,Washington DC,
Street Foods
concentrates on
this important segment of informal employment in
provincial cities in Egypt, Senegal, Nigeria,
Bangladesh,Thailand, the Philippines and Indonesia.
GUIDE TO FURTHER READING
A.L.Checkering and M.Salahdine (eds) (1991c)
The Silent Revolution: The Informal Sector in Five
Asian and Near Eastern Countries.
San Francisco:
International Center for Economic Growth. A
text primarily concerned with existing and
prospective policies for the urban informal sector,
including case studies from Morocco, Bangladesh,
Sri Lanka, Thailand and the Philippines.
J.Gugler (ed.) (1997)
Cities in the Developing World:
Issues, Theory and Policy.
Oxford: Oxford University
Press. Contains various chapters on different aspects
of the informal sector, including theory and policy
in the context of street occupations in Colombia
(Bromley), gender divisions of labour in a Nairobi
shanty town (Nelson), the changing fortunes of a
Jakarta street trader between the 1940s and the 1990s
(Jellinek), and child labour (Grootaert and Kanbur).
C.Moser (1978) Informal Sector or Petty
Commodity Production? Dualism or
Dependence in Urban Development.
World
Development
6, 135-78. A classic paper on the
informal sector in developing countries, which,
drawing on a neo-Marxist theoretical framework,
argues that the informal sector is strongly linked
to the formal sector in a range of subordinate ways.
G.Standing andV.Tokman (eds) (1991)
Towards Social
Adjustment: Labour Market Issues in Structural
REFERENCES
Acero, L. (1997) Conflicting demands of new technology and
household work: women's work in Brazilian and
Argentinian textiles. In S.Mitter and S.Rowbotham (eds)
Women Encounter Technology: Changing Patterns of
Employment in the Third World,
London: Routledge, 70-92.
Alba, F. (1989) The Mexican demographic situation. In
F.Bean, J.Schmandt and S.Weintraub (eds)
Mexican and
Central American Population and US Immigration Policy,
Austin: University ofTexas Press, 5-32.
Alonzo, R. (1991) The informal sector in the Philippines.
In A.L.Chickering and M.Salahdine (eds)
The Silent
Revolution: The Informal Sector in Five Asian and Near
Eastern Countries,
San Francisco: International Center
for Economic Growth, 39-70.
Baden, S. (1993)
The Impact of Recession and Structural
Adjustment on Women's Work in Developing Countries.
Sussex: Institute of Development Studies, Bridge
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