Dualism in the Informal Economy Exploring the Ind

Authors: Rajesh Bhattacharya Snehashish Bhattacharya Kalyan Kumar Sanyal

Publish Date: 2013

Volume: , Issue: , Pages: 339-362

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Abstract

Over the past four decades the informal economy has become central to understanding poverty in developing countries and devising welfare policies The informal economy has emerged as an important economic space for state interventions in poverty alleviation This is reflected in the explosion of official statistics on the informal sector at the national level Yet “informal economy” remains one of the fuzziest concepts in circulation yielding to every contextual demand on its meaning As Maloney 2004 p 1159 observes “three decades of research have not yielded consensus either on the definition of the informal sector or its “razon de ser””We feel that to understand the current conjuncture of postcolonial development in countries like India it is imperative to move beyond some of the dominant theories and the conventional debates on the informal economy and cast a fresh look at conditions of existence reproduction and survival of the informal sector Moreover

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