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Baez, Morales Antonio. "Three Empirical Essays on Informality." Doctoral thesis, Universitat de Barcelona, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/10803/318156.
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Informality is a very complex subject, with the informal workers we see on the streets as only the surface of larger and more complicated issues. The word "informality," when applied to labour, has negative associations. However, it is necessary to identify the economic agents that make up this sector. In this way, studying informality from different perspectives is one of the most important objectives of this thesis. The thesis focuses its analysis on informal labour and economic units, placing the informality of firms at the centre of the study in two chapters. In this way, two main aspects of informality are studied here: labour informality and business informality. Labour informality is analysed in a macroeconomic context and its relationship with investments. Firm informality is analysed from a micro-firm perspective, which has been largely ignored in the literature, with the measurement of micro-firm informality on a per-state basis within a developing country, Mexico, as another objective. A further objective is to ascertain whether there are differences in efficiency between formal and informal micro-firms. The particular objectives and results are as follows: Chapter 2 examines how informal labor markets affect the flows of FDI, and also whether this effect is similar in developed and developing countries. It highlights for the period of study (1996-2009), and the use of panel econometric models in this kind of researches. The sample is made up 65 countries. In addition, this paper uses a dynamic model as an extension of the analysis to establish whether such an effect exists and what its indicators and significance may be. While the results shows that informal labor markets are significant and do positively affect the flow of FDI, these effects are felt up to a certain level of informality, above which the effect becomes negative. The results are similar for developed and developing countries and are robust to several checks. Chapter 3 analyzes the determinants of micro-firms informality in Mexican states inasmuch as the research for micro firms in a developing country has been less noticeable. In this paper, Mexico is taken as case of study by its high level of micro firm informality and the heterogeneity among Mexican states, but also due to data availability. Panel econometric models are estimated for a sample of 32 states over the period 2008-2012. In addition, this paper uses different definitions of informality to check the robustness of the results. The obtained empirical evidence allows us to conclude that, although, economic factors are the main causes of informality variables such as corruption and education have important role to play. Chapter 4 separates formal and informal micro firms in order to test whether there are efficiency differences between them, and to explain these differences. One of the novelties of the study is the use of the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition method, which enables an analysis of the differences between both groups of firms after controlling for their different allocation of factors. The empirical evidence suggests that output differences can be explained by endowment characteristics, while efficiency differences are explained by endowment returns. The main variables to explain the gap between the groups are the owner’s level of education, the firm’s age, the owner’s motivations, and financing as well.
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Aleman-Castilla, Benjamin. "Informality and temporary migration in Mexico." Thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science (University of London), 2007. http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/2042/.
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This thesis studies two characteristics of the Mexican labour markets; informality and migration to the United States. Chapter 1 studies the impact of NAFTA on informality and wages, the former measured in a reduced form through the fraction of workers without any social or health coverage (unregistered workers). Using data on Mexican and U.S. import tariffs with the Mexican National Survey of Urban Labour (ENEU), I find that reductions in tariffs are related to reductions in unregistered labour. Unregistered labour decreases less in high import-penetration industries and more in export oriented ones. The Mexican tariffs are also negatively related to real wages, while the U.S. tariffs are negatively related to the registered-unregistered wage differentials. Chapter 2 is a joint work with Arturo Ramirez. It uses two Mexican tax reforms to test whether the unregistered sector is sensitive to changes in the tax burden. The first is the 1989 implementation of an asset tax, and the second is the 1999 elimination of accelerated depreciation allowances. The data comes from the ENEU, from which estimates of unregistration are derived; and the Annual Industrial Survey (EIA), from which the differential effects of the 1999 reform on each region and industry are implied. It is found that the response of unregistered labour to changes in taxes is heterogeneous, depending both on the economic sector and the nature of the tax policy. Lastly, chapter 3 studies the effect of temporary migration to the U.S. on labour market outcomes of Mexican workers. It uses panel data from the 1994-2002 ENEU, which is ideal for minimizing self-selection biases common to other sources. Fixed-effects estimation indicates that temporary migrants obtain higher earnings in the U.S. labour market during the period of migration. They also work longer hours and face a higher likelihood of non employment. Finally, the gains from migration are lower for more skilled workers and for those migrating from the most distant regions, relative to the U.S.
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Schipper, Tyler. "Aggregate Consequences of Innovation and Informality." Thesis, University of Oregon, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/18437.
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The fundamental question in development economics is what causes some countries to become more prosperous than others. The literature, starting with Hall and Jones (1999), has identified differences in total factor productivity (TFP) as being the driver of cross-country income differences. I investigate policies that may give rise to these differences in TFP. I pay particular attention to the influence of informal economies in developing countries and how macroeconomic policies can distort firm-level incentives to innovate and operate formally.
To address these questions, I construct a series of macroeconomic models which have several common elements. First, I model firm-level decisions with regard to innovation. These firm-level decisions ultimately give rise to differences in productivity across countries. Second, I embrace the role of firm heterogeneity in productivity to examine the dynamics of firm choice. Finally, through the use of computational methods, I simulate these models to evaluate the macroeconomic effects of policy distortions on firm-level decision making.
Subject to the common elements above, each chapter answers a specific policy question. Chapter II asks whether size-based tax distortions can generate firm-size distributions often observed in developing countries. I find that a model with innovation and firm-level heterogeneity can explain the prevalence of large firms in response to tax distortions, but additional frictions are necessary to explain the ubiquity of small firms in most developing countries. It also illustrates tax distortions may have little impact on aggregate output while dramatically reducing innovation. Chapter III documents that tax rates can negatively affect growth by inducing firms to participate in the informal sector rather than the formal sector. Finally, Chapter IV shows how tax revenues are affected by changes in tax rates given the provision of a productive public good.
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Sanches, Daniel Rocha. "Informality in labor market and welfare." reponame:Repositório Institucional do FGV, 2005. http://hdl.handle.net/10438/196.
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Previous issue date: 2005-06-10The neoclassical growth model with two sectors in production is employed in this paper in order to investigate how a change in the tax structure affects informality and welfare. We calibrate and simulate the model and find that welfare always increases when we reduce the tax rate on the demand for labor and adjust the tax rate on the value added so that the government revenue remains constant.
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ULYSSEA, GABRIEL LOPES DE. "INSTITUTIONS AND LABOR MARKET INFORMALITY IN BRAZIL." PONTIFÍCIA UNIVERSIDADE CATÓLICA DO RIO DE JANEIRO, 2004. http://www.maxwell.vrac.puc-rio.br/Busca_etds.php?strSecao=resultado&nrSeq=5551@1.
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CONSELHO NACIONAL DE DESENVOLVIMENTO CIENTÍFICO E TECNOLÓGICONos últimos 15 anos, o grau de informalidade no mercado de trabalho brasileiro vem aumentando quase que monotonicamente, tendo permanecido estável nos últimos dois anos em torno de 60% da população economicamente ativa. Este fenômeno impressiona não só pela grandeza como também pela persistência, levando a uma pergunta inevitável: o que está acontecendo e por quê? As instituições do mercado de trabalho são freqüentemente apontadas como uma das principais causas do seu mau funcionamento e argumenta-se que seu desenho inadequado estaria gerando incentivos à informalidade tanto para trabalhadores quanto para empregadores. Este trabalho tem por objetivo contribuir para o debate analisando os efeitos destas instituições sobre o grau de informalidade, desemprego e bem-estar da economia. Para tanto, desenvolve-se um modelo de matching com dois setores - formal e informal - em que firmas e trabalhadores negociam salários (através de uma barganha de Nash) e que incorpora as principais características institucionais do mercado de trabalho brasileiro. O modelo é resolvido numericamente, o que permite realizar experimentos de política não só qualitativos como também quantitativos. A partir dos resultados obtidos com estes exercícios é possível observar que variações nos custos de demissão têm impactos mais significativos sobre o grau de informalidade e desemprego do que reduções no custo não salarial do trabalho. Mostra-se também que a legislação não pode ser responsabilizada pelos elevados diferenciais de salários observados entre trabalhadores dos setores formal e informal. Ao contrário, na ausência de qualquer heterogeneidade entre firmas e empregados, o diferencial unicamente induzido pela legislação é amplamente favorável aos trabalhadores informais. Além da análise formal, é feita também uma revisão da literatura relevante.
In the last 15 years, informality in the Brazilian labor market has been rising steadily, having stabilized in the last two years around 60% of the economically active population. The magnitude of this phenomenon is impressive not only for its intensity but also for its persistence, leading to an inevitable question: what is happening and why? Labor market institutions are usually pointed as one of the main causes of informality and it is frequently argued that their poor design would be generating incentives towards informality both for workers and employers. The objective of this work its to contribute for the debate analyzing the effects of these institutions on the informality degree, unemployment and welfare of the economy. To do so, I develop a matching model with two sectors - formal and informal - where workers and firms negotiate wages (through a Nash bargain) and the main institutional characteristics of the Brazilian labor market are included. The model is numerically solved, what allows investigating not only qualitative but also quantitative effects of policy experiments. From the results obtained with these exercises is possible to observe, for instance, that variations in the dismissal costs have more significant impacts on the informality degree and equilibrium unemployment than reductions in non-wage costs of labor. Besides this formal analysis, a review of the relevant literature and of the Brazilian labor legislation is made.
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Papier, Warren. "Support structures as an approach to informality." Master's thesis, University of Cape Town, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/11427/5589.
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Flochel, Thomas Robert Kenneth Lawrence Arthur. "Essays on rent-seeking, corruption and informality." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/28027.
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This thesis compiles three essays on corruption and informality in the developing world. The first chapter focuses on the industrial organisation effects of favouritism in public procurement in the context of Paraguay. It is the first empirical microeconomic study to illustrate the fact that rent-seeking is costly for development by showing how entrepreneurs' economic incentives are distorted toward unproductive activities as the result of favouritism in the allocation of public contracts in Paraguay. Our findings highlight the importance of tackling corruption by shedding light on some of the large dynamic 'hidden' costs of corruption over and above the static costs of bribery and embezzlement. We find that in Paraguay institutions with an important procurement activity are more likely to engage in corrupt dealings. As for firms, they have a greater probability of obtaining a contract directly through an exceptional procedure from an institution with which they have a strong contractual relation, both in terms of the total value and frequency of transactions, particularly when dealing with more corrupt State entities. Finally firms trading more with the public sector are found to be more profitable, even when controlling for their unobserved characteristics, reflecting the misallocation of talent towards this largely unproductive sector induced by favouritism. Large rents linked to the resale of imported goods to the State and the historical absence of an import-substitution strategy have contributed to make Paraguay one of the least industrialised economies in South America as, apart from the soybean and meat sectors, its entrepreneurs have systematically specialised in commercial intermediation, often with the public sector as sole client, rather than in production. The costs of this productive atrophy and biased specialisation are reflected in the poor record of economic growth. Several policy implications emerge from this chapter. First, whilst the existence of an exceptional purchase mechanism is clearly needed to deal with cases of emergency, it is also important that a mechanism of checks and balances ensure its use remains exceptional. Second, more transparency in the allocation of contracts can be achieved by putting together a registry of State providers, including the names of the firm owners and members of the administration board. Third, the move towards greater transparency also includes better data keeping and diffusion. Provided good quality data, an analysis like this one could assess the state of competition in public contracts more frequently, which could also help to target monitoring efforts. These proposals were put to the Paraguayan government in a report which I wrote for Transparency International (Paraguay) and presented to the newly elected government in September 2008. The second chapter analyses the political economy of labour regulatory enforcement in Brazil. In the context of the empirical political economy literature in Brazil, the analysis reveals that, contrary to other areas of the public sector, the work of the labour inspectorate in Brazil is not subject to political manipulation. I test firstly for electoral cycles in the imposition of labour fines, secondly whether labour regulations are selectively enforced according to political motivations and finally, I assess whether 'pork barrel' strategies are used in order to sway voters. Electoral results are matched with a novel dataset of fines imposed on firms for labour infractions to test these considerations. First, the analysis finds that mayors' and the president's political interests are not significantly correlated with the distribution of fines, neither is the alignment of local politicians with governors or the president. Second, the appointment of a new governor is found to be a highly disruptive event for the inspectorate, as evidenced by the steep rise in the number of fines issues in governors' second term. Third, towns where the governor received strong support in the last election have marginally fewer fines on average. This corroborates the evidence from the institutional analysis of the inspectorate, namely that a key channel for political influence on regulatory enforcement is through the regional inspectorate superintendents who are appointed by the state governors. However fourthly, in contrast with Ferraz (2007)'s findings in the context of environmental regulations in Brazil, the pattern of targeting does not vary significantly along the electoral cycle making it unlikely to be an electoral clientelism strategy. The important reforms in the organisation of the labour inspectorate in Brazil since the mid-1990s to guarantee more autonomy to the inspectors have probably had a positive effect in protecting them from the influence of powerful politicians. In this sense, the significant correlation between governors' political interests and the issuance of fines suggests that the appointment of the regional inspectorate director should also be kept independent of the political preferences of the governor. Nonetheless, the availability of other, more efficient and more effective means to sway voters in Brazil suggests that labour inspections are not so much at risk of clientelistic manipulation. In fact, fiscal transfers have received far more attention in the political economy literature precisely for this reason.Finally, the fourth chapter builds a voting model in a dual sector economy to explain the relation between taxation and informality in cross-country data. Voters in countries with high informality rates tend to vote for lower redistribution and taxation rates. This is explained in the model by the poor quality of institutions in such countries, which cause the relative premium from formalising to be low. The elasticity of formal production to taxation is therefore lower where institutional quality is poor: For a given increase in the tax rate, more individuals will hide in the shadow economy. As a consequence, the welfare maximising tax rate is found to be lower than in countries where there are more benefits from formalising. Moreover, comparative statics on the level of labour productivity show that improvements in institutional quality are more important in countries with a less productive labour force, as they lead to greater increases in redistribution and reductions in the informality share. The model integrates political mechanisms as well as economic features and in doing so shows the non-trivial interaction between informality and policy choice. More attention should be paid to this interaction when studying the determinants of informality, instead of taking policy choice as exogenous. Moreover, this chapter contributes a theoretical framework that is well adapted to studying political economy features of developing countries, where informality is a key characteristic of the economy. Several projects and ideas for further research have germinated from work on this thesis. One in particular focuses on the relationship between informality and corruption, which has drawn increasing amounts of research interest lately. One aspect that has however eluded the literature to date is the impact of informality on voting behaviour. In a democratic setting, I argue that widespread informality weakens the effectiveness of elections as a mechanism for selecting and disciplining politicians, essentially because informal voters receive an imperfect signal on politicians types. This research would contribute to explaining the persistence of corruption alongside widespread informality in much of the developing world.
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Kan, Elif Oznur. "Essays On Informality In The Turkish Labor Market." Phd thesis, METU, 2012. http://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/12614491/index.pdf.
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This thesis investigates the nature, extent and dynamics of informal employment in the Turkish labor market using 2006-2009 Turkish Income and Living Conditions Survey. It is mainly a collection of three essays. In the first essay, an attempt is made to analyze the relevance and implications of three alternative characterizations of informality which include an enterprise-based definition associating informality with small firms, an extended enterprise-based definition incorporating social security protection, and a definition based exclusively on social security coverage. Using probit analysis, we show that social security criterion is the best measure given its ability to capture key relationships between individual characteristics and informality. In the second essay, we compute Markov transition probabilities of individuals moving across six labor market states, then estimate multinomial logit regressions to identify underlying dynamics of variant mobility patterns. Confirming traditional theory which sees formal employment as the ultimate desirable state, we find that formal-salaried individuals are the most reluctant to move and that the probability of transition from informal-salaried state to formal-salaried state is five times that of reverse transition. In the third essay, we examine formal/informal employment earnings differentials. OLS estimation of standard Mincerian equations reveals an informal penalty, half of which can be explained by observable characteristics. Moreover, applying fixed effects regressions, we show that unobserved individual fixed effects when combined with controls for observable individual and employment characteristics explain the pay differentials entirely.
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Granström, Ola. "Aid, drugs, and informality : essays in empirical economics." Doctoral thesis, Handelshögskolan i Stockholm, Samhällsekonomi (S), 2008. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:hhs:diva-455.
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The first three papers of this Ph.D. thesis experimentally study the preferences of individuals making cross-border charitable donations. In Is Foreign Aid Paternalistic? (with Anna Breman and Felix Masiye) subjects choose whether to make a monetary or a tied transfer (mosquito nets) to an anonymous household in Zambia. The mean donation of mosquito nets differs significantly from zero, and paternalistic donors constitute a higher share of the sample than do purely altruistic donors. The second paper, Corruption and the Case for Tied Aid (with Anna Breman), compares the willingness to give money to Zambia's national health budget (CBoH) with the willingness to donate mosquito nets to a health-care clinic in Lusaka. Donors clearly prefer tied aid to untied program aid. Exit questionnaires suggest the reason to be a fear of corruption and misallocation at the CBoH. In Altruism without Borders? (with Anna Breman), we study whether the willingness to give increase with the information given about the recipients. We find no significant effect of identification on donations. Women and Informality: Evidence from Senegal, the fourth paper (with Elena Bardasi), uses household survey data to study women’s work and gender wage gaps in the formal and informal sector in Dakar. Multinomial logit analysis reveals that women are 3-4 times less likely to work formally rather than informally. Wage regressions reveal that little schooling, for instance, explains a considerable part of the gender wage gap. In the informal sector, however, the wage gap between men and women remains at 28%. The fifth paper, Does Innovation Pay? A Study of the Pharmaceutical Product Cycle, examines how a drug’s life cycle depends on its degree of therapeutic innovation. All New Chemical Entities introduced in Sweden between 1987 and 2000 are rated into one of three innovation classes: A (important gains); B (modest gains); and C (little gains). Over a 15-year life cycle, the average class A drug raises 15% higher revenues than B drugs and 114% higher revenues than C drugs. But yearly class A and C sales differences are rarely significant. When comparing innovative (A and B pooled) and imitative (C) drugs, 15-year life cycle revenues of innovative drugs exceed those of imitative drugs by 100%. This sales difference is significant in 19 out of 20 years after launch.Diss. Stockholm : Handelshögskolan i Stockholm, 2008 Sammanfattning jämte 5 uppsatser
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Granström, Ola. "Aid, drugs, and informality : essays in empirical economics /." Stockholm : Economic Research Institute, Stockholm School of Economics (EFI), 2008. http://www2.hhs.se/efi/summary/756.htm.
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Byiers, Bruce Irving. "Enterprise development and informality : case studies from Mozambique." Thesis, University of Sussex, 2009. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.496919.
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This thesis provides an empirical analysis of enterprise development and informality in Mozambique. It explores factors which hinder the development of the enterprise sector, focussing on the heterogeneity of firm responses to the institutional environment, with important consequences for economic growth, employment and poverty reduction. With the growing consensus on the centrality of institutions to economic growth, this thesis provides firm-level evidence to support the findings of aggregate, cross-country level analyses. Using enterprise survey evidence, it comprises four case studies from Mozambique, a country characterised in recent years by high economic growth rates but persistently high unemployment and poverty levels.
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MONTEIRO, JOANA DA COSTA MARTINS. "MICRO ENTERPRISES IN BRAZIL: INFORMALITY AND LABOR CONTRACTS." PONTIFÍCIA UNIVERSIDADE CATÓLICA DO RIO DE JANEIRO, 2004. http://www.maxwell.vrac.puc-rio.br/Busca_etds.php?strSecao=resultado&nrSeq=5488@1.
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COORDENAÇÃO DE APERFEIÇOAMENTO DO PESSOAL DE ENSINO SUPERIOREste trabalho apresenta os resultados de dois estudos empíricos utilizando a base de dados da Economia Informal Urbana (ECINF) do IBGE sobre micro negócios nas capitais do Brasil. O primeiro estudo avalia o impacto da introdução da lei do SIMPLES sobre a formalização das firmas. Introduzida em 1996, essa lei reduziu e simplificou a carga fiscal das micro e pequenas empresas brasileiras. Utilizando os métodos diferenças em diferenças e propensity score matching, verificou-se que a lei estimulou as firmas de comércio a entrarem no setor formal. O segundo estudo investiga a associação (matching) entre características observáveis dos empregados e seus empregadores. Foram encontradas evidências da existência de matching: os proprietários das firmas contratam trabalhadores com o mesmo sexo, faixa etária e nível educacional que o seu. Além disso, há evidências de que essa combinação afeta a escolha do contrato: empregados e empregadores parecidos têm mais chances de estabelecer contratos que remuneram o desempenho.
This thesis explores the ECINF database, a survey conducted by the Brazilian Census Bureau that investigates micro- enterprises in Brazil, in two different aspects. First, the enactment of a new tax registration system (SIMPLES) is investigated. This system has reduced the tax collection of small and micro enterprises in Brazil. Using difference in difference and propensity score matching methods, it was found that the new system has increased the formality among firms in the retail sector. Second, the linked employer-employee nature of the data was used to study the issue of matching between employers and employees. The results indicate the presence of matching in the labor contracts. There is evidence that employers tend to contract workers with the same gender, age and educational level. Moreover, it is shown that this matching affects the contract form. People with the same gender and educational level prefer piece rate contracts.
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Chien, Ker-Hsuan. "Water, informality, and hybridising urban governance in Taiwan." Thesis, Aberystwyth University, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/2160/cc4780ba-760d-4d30-8440-40bb090458d8.
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In the past ten years urban adaptation in the changing climate has become a primary concern for urban governance, as cities, especially those in developing countries, are burgeoning while natural disasters escalate, Securing the human habitat in the urban areas has became central to the sustaining of the human race. Dealing with urban water, therefore, is a ceaseless struggle between nature and the human need to seek new knowledge and technology in urban water governance. Being a city in great danger of flooding, Taipei's way of taming urban water has been a long process of disaster experience, knowledge learning, policy transferral, and negotiation with local citizenry. By delineating Taipei's water taming process, not only we can understand the city and water through their co-evolving processes, but we can also re-think how urban water has been conceptualised by man, and how this conceptualisation has affected the human dwellings on the waterfront. To depict the shifting human-water relationships of Taipei, this thesis employs the Deleuzean assemblage theory, treating Taipei's urban water governance as an assembling process of natural events, knowledge learning, mobile urban policy, urban informality, and neoliberal ideology. By adopting assemblage theory in the case of Taipei's urban water governance, the interweaving of floods, water knowledge, historical incidents, human dwellings, and the conducting of neoliberal urban governance can thus be re-figured in a processual manner, as a part of the constituting of the urban assemblage. Through attending to each of the constituents of this assemblage, seeing all parts of the urban assemblage as active and significant, this thesis not only demonstrates how water and the city shape each other, but it also indicates new possibilities in negotiating with neoliberal urban governance.
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Birkinshaw, Matt. "Murky waters : infrastructure, informality and reform in Delhi." Thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science (University of London), 2017. http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/3770/.
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This thesis contributes a rich empirical analysis of urban water governance in Delhi, with particular attention to informality, groundwater and reforms. My research aims to develop understanding of the relationships between reforms, under both private sector management and a new progressive government, and existing informal water arrangements, particularly groundwater use, which households rely on in the absence of adequate public sector supply. I draw on interviews with 150 residents, as well as water suppliers, project officials, government staff, politicians and party workers over 18 months of multi-sited research in South Delhi’s unauthorised colonies and urban villages. I use the idea of ‘informal infrastructures’ or ‘infrastructural informality’ connects my empirical research across different sites and scales. Bringing ideas from the literature on informality and infrastructures together under this framing offers modifications to the ways that ‘informality’ and ‘infrastructures’ are often understood and used. I use informality in this way ‘as a method’ to focus on the contingently enacted, materially and socially constituted character of various infrastructure processes. I analyse the informal governance and politics of water supply at three difference sites and scales. Within Delhi’s government network at an all-city level I note the formally and informally differentiated nature of the network and the challenges of knowledge and control of it. Outside of the piped network, I examine the decentralised infrastructures of tubewells and water tankers, primarily in the South Delhi areas of Sangam Vihar and Deoli. These decentralised supply modes are socially embedded in systems of party politics, caste and land-ownership with a range of opportunities for discretion, patronage and misallocation. They illustrate the connection and contrasts between informality in different resources, such as land and water, and infrastructures. I then examine an additional layer of urban water governance, in a Public Private Partnership (PPP) for urban water reform, in a zone around the Malviya Nagar area, also in South Delhi. I argue that the complexity of India’s urban social hydrology, even in wealthy areas, has been underestimated by this initiative, and that despite an evolution of the PPP model concerns over the project’s equity and viability remain. The high level of informality across different infrastructural systems in my research sites suggests the coexistence of a submerged ‘technopolitics’ operating through bureaucratic and technical modes of governance, with both overt and covert uses of intercession, personalisation and force. The study makes contributions to knowledge in the following areas: informal urban water supply in India, particularly in unauthorised colonies and urban villages, in a region of high groundwater use, its relationship to water supply reforms from both government and a multinational public-private partnership.
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Tondini, Alessandro. "Cash transfers, employment and informality in South Africa." Thesis, Paris 1, 2019. http://www.theses.fr/2019PA01E014/document.
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Cette thèse porte sur les effets de transferts monétaires sur l’emploi dans le marché du travail sud-africain, un marché fortement segmenté entre secteur formel et informel. Le premier et principal chapitre montre qu’un programme de transferts monétaires inconditionnels destinés aux mères a eu des effets positifs durables sur la qualité de leurs emplois. Sur le long terme, les mères bénéficiaires du transfert sont plus susceptibles d’être employées dans le secteur formel. C’est la conséquence de changements dans la façon dont les mères traitées cherchent un emploi. En leur donnant la possibilité de rester au chômage pendant plus longtemps, le programme de transferts inconditionnels leur permet de viser des emplois de meilleure qualité. Le deuxième chapitre étudie les effets sur l’emploi d’une réforme du système public de retraites en Afrique du Sud, qui est non-contributif et soumis à conditions de ressources. Cette réforme a abaissé l’âge de la retraite de 65 à 60 ans pour les hommes. Elle a entraîné une forte diminution du taux d’activité des travailleurs informels, qui cessent de travailler lorsqu’ils atteignent 60 ans et deviennent éligibles à la pension de retraite non-contributive. Au contraire, les travailleurs du secteur formel ne quittent pas leur emploi et ne se tournent pas vers le secteur informel pour avoir droit à la pension de retraite. Enfin, cette thèse aborde la question du faible nombre de travailleurs indépendants en Afrique du Sud. Le dernier chapitre montre que les Sud-Africains ne travaillent pas plus à leur compte en réponse à des transferts monétaires. Cela indique que les contraintes de liquidité ne sont pas la principale raison du manque de travailleurs indépendants en Afrique du Sud. Cette faible présence de travailleurs indépendants a probablement des racines historiques liées à l’apartheid. Ce troisième chapitre examine les implications potentielles de cette explication, ainsi que les pistes de recherches futures possibles pour une compréhension plus fine de ce phénomèneThis dissertation studies the employment effects of cash transfers in a segmented labor market. The first and main chapter shows that an unconditional cash transfer program targeted at mothers has lasting positive impacts on job quality. Five years after having received the cash transfer, treated mothers are more likely to be employed in the formal sector. This appears to be the result of changes in the way recipients search for a job, as treated mothers are unemployed for longer and target better jobs. The second chapter shows the employment effects of a reform in the means-tested, non-contributory pension system of South Africa, which lowered the age of retirement from 65 to 60 for men. The reform caused a large extensive-margin response, as informal workers stop working when they become eligible to the pension. Instead, formal workers do not quit their jobs nor switch to the informal sector to become eligible to the pension. Lastly, this dissertation discusses the lack of self-employment in South Africa. Building on the results of the first two chapters, the last chapter shows that South Africans do not increase entry to self-employment as a result of cash transfers. This indicates that liquidity constraints are not the main reason for the lack of self-employment in South Africa, which is likely to have historical roots stemming from Apartheid. The chapter discusses evidence and potential policy implications of this explanation, alongside possible avenues for future research on this phenomenon
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Wafer, Alex. "Informality, infrastructure and the State in post-apartheid Johannesburg." Thesis, Open University, 2011. http://oro.open.ac.uk/54931/.
Full textAbstract:
The central argument of this thesis is that the spatiality of encounter between state and citizenship in post-apartheid South Africa is unequal and discontinuous. Although the developmental post-apartheid state remains a powerful political narrative, the existence of what have been called'informal' modes of association and organisation suggests that this imagination has not completely permeated post-apartheid society. Based on a case study of 'informal' street traders in inner city Johannesburg, I argue in this thesis that in fact a very particular state geography is emergent in post-apartheid South Africa: using a theoretical literature that includes state theory, governmentality studies and critical post-colonial geography I suggest that mutual imaginations of state and citizenship intersect in particular nodes of encounter. In a context where the institutions of state have neither a coherent nor a singular view of everyday associational life in the city, the Johannesburg Metropolitan Municipality has developed a strategy of building formal market places in an attempt to intersect the informal networks that most street traders are implicated into. Markets such as the high-profile Metro Mall in the inner city of Johannesburg therefore serve as nodes of encounter between state and citizens, or what Law (2004) might refer to as Obligatory Points of Passage. Through these markets, the municipality has attempted to encourage traders to imagine themselves as responsible entrepreneurs, and to therefore implicate traders into new networks of association that allow traders to share in an imagination of the post-apartheid developmental state. However, these encounters do not always produce predictable outcomes, and I demonstrate how the Metro Mall serves also as a context for traders to represent to the municipality different expectations of citizenship.
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Fradejas-García, Ignacio. "Mobility, informality and networks in transnational social fields|movilidad, informalidad y redes en campos sociales transnacionales." Doctoral thesis, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 2021. http://hdl.handle.net/10803/673310.
Full textAbstract:
Aquesta tesi analitza els processos i pràctiques que condueixen a la formació de camps socials transnacionals (CSTS) i la seva relació amb el sorgiment d’enclavaments de migrants dins de la UE. Específicament, aquesta tesi investiga les (im)mobilitats i les pràctiques informals que els migrants romanesos a Espanya utilitzen per superar les limitacions dels canviants règims de mobilitat i les lluites de la vida quotidiana. Basada en un treball de camp etnogràfic de llarga durada i en anàlisi de xarxes socials, la investigació se centra en dos enclavaments demogràfics de romanesos a Espanya, Castelló de la Plana i Roquetas de Mar, amdós estan socialment connectats amb les principals regions d’origen dels immigrants a Romania, Dâmboviţa i Bistriţa-Năsăud respectivament. Recolzats per les seves xarxes i atrets pel mercat de treball formal i informal, els migrants romanesos a Espanya van passar de ser uns pocs milers el 1998 a gairebé 900.000 el 2012. Es concentren en ubicacions geogràfiques específiques creant enclavaments demogràfics, és a dir, concentracions de migrants d’un origen determinat en una destinació particular, connectats amb les seves àrees d’origen a través de CSTS, que faciliten el manteniment dels seus vincles transnacionals amb Romania mentre possibiliten el seu assentament en aquest nou context social, cultural, econòmic i polític. En aquest cas, la seva arribada va ser aplanada pels mercats laborals associats a dos robustos districtes industrials, com són la indústria ceràmica a Castelló de la Plana i l’agroindústria a Roquetas de Mar, que van proporcionar oportunitats laborals i d’emprenedoria, així com diverses formes de treball formal i informal. Les troballes d’aquesta tesi mostren com els migrants en aquests contextos transnacionals fan servir les pràctiques informals i les (im)mobilitats per esquivar i combatre situacions de desigualtat que els exclouen de l’accés formal a serveis, treball i oportunitats. L’adaptació a aquestes noves situacions vitals passa a través de dos processos paral·lels: informalització i formalització. D’una banda, el procés d’informalització implica aprendre les regles no escrites i seleccionar, preservar i ajustar les seves pràctiques informals al nou context, abandonant aquelles que són nocives, il·lícites o il·legals. D’altra banda, el procés de formalització implica aprendre les regles formals i adaptar les pràctiques al pluralisme legal, com (p. Ex., les lleis consuetudinàries o les lleis religioses), a la regularització burocràtica (p. Ex., aonseguir permisos de residència i treball) i a l’establiment d’institucions romaneses que faciliten les formes de vida transnacionals (p. ex., esglésies, consolats, associacions o empreses). Més enllà de la comprensió de la migració com un agregat de decisions individuals, aquesta tesi avança en el coneixement sobre les estratègies de subsistència que adopten els treballadors migrants interns de la UE per guanyar-se la vida. Entendre com les pràctiques informals i la (im)mobilitat són utilitzades a diferents escales transnacionals, facilita l’examen dels efectes socials, culturals, econòmics i polítics dels principis de la lliure circulació i de la integració europea, que estan produint canvis socials que perduraran durant generacions.Esta tesis analiza los procesos y prácticas que conducen a la formación de campos sociales transnacionales (CSTs) y su relación con el surgimiento de enclaves de migrantes dentro de la UE. Específicamente, esta tesis investiga las (in)movilidades y las prácticas informales que los migrantes rumanos en España utilizan para superar las limitaciones de los cambiantes regímenes de movilidad y las luchas de la vida cotidiana. Basada en un trabajo de campo etnográfico de larga duración y en análisis de redes sociales, la investigación se centra en dos enclaves demográficos de rumanos en España, Castelló de la Plana y Roquetas de Mar, ambos socialmente conectados con las principales regiones de origen de los inmigrantes en Rumanía, Dâmboviţa y Bistriţa-Năsăud respectivamente. Apoyados por sus redes y atraídos por el mercado de trabajo formal e informal, los migrantes rumanos en España pasaron de ser unos pocos miles en 1998 a casi 900.000 en 2012. Se concentran en ubicaciones geográficas específicas creando enclaves demográficos, es decir, concentraciones de migrantes de un origen determinado en un destino particular, conectados con sus áreas de origen a través de CSTs, que facilitan el mantenimiento de sus vínculos transnacionales con Rumania mientras posibilitan su asentamiento en este nuevo contexto social, cultural, económico y político. En este caso, su llegada fue allanada por los mercados laborales asociados a dos robustos distritos industriales, como son la industria cerámica en Castelló de la Plana y la agroindustria en Roquetas de Mar, que proporcionaron oportunidades laborales y de emprendimiento, así como diversas formas de trabajo formal e informal. Los hallazgos de esta tesis muestran cómo los migrantes en estos contextos transnacionales usan las prácticas informales y las (in)movilidades para sortear y combatir situaciones de desigualdad que los excluyen del acceso formal a servicios, trabajo y oportunidades. La adaptación a estas nuevas situaciones vitales ocurre a través de dos procesos paralelos: informalización y formalización. Por un lado, el proceso de informalización implica aprender las reglas no escritas y seleccionar, preservar y ajustar sus prácticas informales al nuevo contexto, abandonando aquellas que son nocivas, ilícitas o ilegales. Por otro lado, el proceso de formalización implica aprender las reglas formales y adaptar las prácticas al pluralismo legal, como (p. ej., las leyes consuetudinarias o las leyes religiosas), a la regularización burocrática (p. ej., conseguir permisos de residencia y trabajo) y al establecimiento de instituciones rumanas que facilitan las formas de vida transnacionales (p. ej., iglesias, consulados, asociaciones o empresas). Más allá de la comprensión de la migración como un agregado de decisiones individuales, esta tesis avanza en el conocimiento sobre las estrategias de subsistencia que adoptan los trabajadores migrantes internos de la UE para ganarse la vida. Entender cómo las practicas informales y la (in)movilidad son utilizadas a diferentes escalas transnacionales, facilita el examen de los efectos sociales, culturales, económicos y políticos de los principios de la libre circulación y de la integración europea, que están produciendo cambios sociales que perdurarán durante generaciones.
This thesis analyses the processes and practices that lead to the formation of transnational social fields (TSFs) and the related emergence of immigrant enclaves within the EU. Specifically, the thesis investigates the (im)mobilities and informal practices that Romanian migrants in Spain use to cope with the constraints of changing mobility regimes and the struggles of their day-to-day lives. Based on long-term multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork and social network analysis, the research focuses on two demographic enclaves of Romanians in Spain, located respectively in Castelló de la Plana and Roquetas de Mar, both of which are connected socially with the main regions of the immigrants’ origins in Romania, respectively Dâmboviţa and Bistriţa-Năsăud. Supported by their networks, and attracted by the formal and informal labour markets, Romanian migrants in Spain grew from a few thousands in 1998 to nearly 900,000 in 2012. They are concentrated in specific geographical locations, creating demographic enclaves – i.e., concentrations of migrants from a given origin in a particular destination – connected with their areas of origin through TSFs, which facilitate the retention of transnational connections with Romania while enabling their settlement in this new social, cultural, economic, and political context. In this case, migrants’ arrivals were smoothed by labour markets in flourishing industrial districts, such as the ceramic industry in Castelló de la Plana and agribusiness in Roquetas de Mar, which provided employment and entrepreneurial opportunities, as well as formal and informal forms of work. The findings reported in this thesis show how migrants in these transnational contexts used informal practices and (im)mobilities to bypass and contest the unequal situations that exclude them from formal access to services, work, and opportunities. Their adaptation to their new living situations happens through two parallel processes: informalisation and formalisation. On the one hand, the informalisation process entails learning the unwritten rules, and selecting, preserving, and adjusting known informal practices to the new context, while abandoning others – mostly harmful, illicit, or illegal practices. On the other hand, the formalisation process involves learning the formal rules and adapting practices to legal pluralism, e.g., customary laws or religious laws; bureaucratic regularization e.g., residence and work permits; and the Romanian institutions that support transnational ways of life, e.g., churches, consulates, associations, or businesses. Going beyond the understanding of migration as an aggregate of individual decisions, this thesis advances our knowledge of the livelihood strategies that low-wage EU-internal migrants adopt in order to make a living. Understanding how informal practices and (im)mobilities are deployed by migrants at various transnational scales facilitates examining the social, economic, and political effects of the principles of free circulation and European integration that are producing social changes that will last for generations to come.
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Programa de Doctorat en Antropologia Social i Cultural
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Park, Thea Alexander. "Broken barrier : mobility, political unionism and economic informality in India." Thesis, University of British Columbia, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/2429/33798.
Full textAbstract:
Economic informality is often treated as defining a segregated, leeching, anti-systemic and apolitical sphere of an economic system. While an estimate 2.8 times the combined total populations of Canada and the United States comprise the informal labour population of India, the visibility of the workers involved is largely obstructed by a combination of natural and forced anonymity. Political unionism is shown as an imperfect instrument to respond to the varied interests of union members in addition to falling under criticism as a privileged process for an elitist, minority section of the working class in India. One of two labour unions recognized as clearly outside political associations is the Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), through which the voice, struggle and intense productivity of workers dubbed part of the informal economic sphere has been brought to the attention of domestic and international policy initiatives. In an analysis of studies engaging with the organized bidi workers of Gujarat and the history of political unionism in India, we see that the barrier between formal and informal is quite firmly an inaccurate product of our analysis. While individual agency in India should be supported and targeted for improvement by international labour laws, conventions and organizations, there needs to be a realization that protection from exploitation is necessary yet blind incorporation of the informal into the formal is not the logical conclusion for sustainable development practices.
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ROCHA, ROBERTO HSU. "FIRMS, INFORMALITY AND WAGE INEQUALITY: THEORY AND EVIDENCE FROM BRAZIL." PONTIFÍCIA UNIVERSIDADE CATÓLICA DO RIO DE JANEIRO, 2018. http://www.maxwell.vrac.puc-rio.br/Busca_etds.php?strSecao=resultado&nrSeq=34861@1.
Full textAbstract:
PONTIFÍCIA UNIVERSIDADE CATÓLICA DO RIO DE JANEIROCOORDENAÇÃO DE APERFEIÇOAMENTO DO PESSOAL DE ENSINO SUPERIOR
FUNDAÇÃO DE APOIO À PESQUISA DO ESTADO DO RIO DE JANEIRO
PROGRAMA DE EXCELENCIA ACADEMICA
BOLSA NOTA 10
O Mercado de trabalho brasileiro passou por mudanças significativas entre 2003 e 2012. A desigualdade de salários, informalidade e desemprego caíram enquanto o salário mínimo real subiu. Evidências empíricas recentes sugerem que o papel das firmas foi importante nesses processos. Este artigo tem dois aspectos principais. Primeiro eu proponho um modelo de search e mathching com firmas e trabalhadores heterogêneos que leva em conta diversos atributos do mercado de trabalho brasileiro como informalidade, desemprego, salário mínimo e desigualdade de salários entre e intra firmas. Em seguida, com o modelo estimado que replica momentos importantes do mercado de trabalho em 2003, eu proponho exercícios contrafactuais para quantificar os determinantes por trás da redução da desigualdade de salários no Brasil. Os resultados do modelo sugerem que as mudanças no valor real do salário mínimo e da composição educacional da força de trabalho explicam grande parte da redução da desigualdade de salários no setor formal, mas são fatores mais limitados na redução da desigualdade de renda na economia como um todo.
The labor market in Brazil had significant changes between 2003 and 2012. Wage inequality, informality and unemployment decreased while the real minimum wage rose. This paper has two major features. First, I propose a search and matching model with heterogeneous firms and workers that takes into account several attributes of the Brazilian labor market such as informality, unemployment, minimum wage, wage variance between and within firms and the educational composition of the workforce. Then, with an estimated model that fits important moments of the labor market in 2003, I make counterfactual exercises to quantify the determinants beneath the reduction of wage inequality. Results from the model suggest that changes in the real value of the minimum wage and the educational attainment of the workforce explain most of the reduction of wage inequality in the formal sector, but are more limited factors in the reduction of wage inequality in the whole economy.
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Kleinenhammans, Sabrina. "Re-envisioning the Indian city : informality and temporality Sabrina Kleinenhammans." Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/49550.
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Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 2009.This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 103-104).
Although informality constitutes an omnipresent and growing phenomenon in the cities of developing countries, planners pay limited attention to this sector. Moreover, current development schemes project Western-planning concepts onto Indian cities despite the fact that these models do not relate to the specific cultural and socioeconomic context of Indian societies. This approach does not provide what is needed: an "inclusive" city, responsive to the diversity of needs and priorities of Indian people. Given this, and the dynamics of rapid urbanization, I question whether the traditional comprehensive planning approach is truly comprehensive and appropriate for coping with the challenges encountered in urban India. Extensive research has been conducted on the social and economic aspects of informal activities in India; however, as yet, there has been very little research exploring spatial conditions that may engender an inclusive city. In three sections, this thesis focuses on the spatial implications of one sector of the informal economy: street vending. The first section introduces the Indian urban realm through a journalistic narrative based on impressions during my first visit to India. The second section is inspired by the challenges of urban growth in the City of Ahmedabad: firstly, it examines current formal planning approaches in Gujarat State; secondly, it portrays the informal city and how it responds to formal planning solutions; finally, it examines the existing and potential relationship between temporal and permanent, or informal and formal systems.
(cont.) The third section explores the way informal processes may inform policy makers and planners in order to develop a framework for defining inclusive urban projects and to propose tools for citywide and local implementation. Subsequently, I apply these strategies to a segment of Ahmedabad's Riverfront Project, which is currently under construction. This exploration, an inclusive alternative to the current plan, highlights the need for, and the potential of, such strategies. In this regard, I conclude that where the formal and the informal "world" coexist, spatial solutions must support effective cooperation between these antagonistic, yet symbiotic domains by providing appropriate space for both formal and informal activities.
S.M.
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Otero, Correa A. F. "Pensions, work and informality : a multi-tier contributory pension system." Thesis, University College London (University of London), 2015. http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1462658/.
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This thesis studies the relationship between pension incentives and formal labour market participation in a multi-tier de ned contribu- tion pension system. During 2008 a mayor pension reform was imple- mented in Chile, changing simultaneously the redistributive welfare and contributory tier of the system, introducing several elements to boost formal labour market participation and reduce inequalities. The expected pension wealth at retirement and the accrual rate have di er- ently changed for di erent group of the population due to the reform. I estimate the e ects of the reform on formal labour market partici- pation using two di erent empirical strategies: First, I use a di erence in di erence estimator to address the e ect of the expected pension wealth on formal labour market participation. I exploit the di eren- tial e ects of the reform on individuals belonging to di erent groups to gain identi cation. The endogenous pension wealth is instrumen- talized using time and group dummies. Second, I solve and estimate a dynamic consumption, labour supply and pension savings accumula- tion life cycle structural model. It complements the existing literature by incorporating the choice of two sectors in the labour market, the formal and informal labour sectors and by allowing for intrahouse- hold bargaining power. Households choose individuals' sector labour supply and consumption in an environment with uncertainty given by sectoral wage shocks, future marital status and future fertility choices. The main results of the thesis are threefold. Firstly, the changes in the nal pension wealth at retirement and the accrual rate have reduced formal labour market participation. Secondly, the reform has increased not only the self- nanced pension wealth but also has importantly improved the nal pension due to the rst tier reform. Finally, even though the nal pension changes have been positive for both gender, the female pension improvement has been much higher than the rise for men reducing the gender inequalities.
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Tanswell, Fenner Stanley. "Proof, rigour and informality : a virtue account of mathematical knowledge." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/10249.
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This thesis is about the nature of proofs in mathematics as it is practiced, contrasting the informal proofs found in practice with formal proofs in formal systems. In the first chapter I present a new argument against the Formalist-Reductionist view that informal proofs are justified as rigorous and correct by corresponding to formal counterparts. The second chapter builds on this to reject arguments from Gödel's paradox and incompleteness theorems to the claim that mathematics is inherently inconsistent, basing my objections on the complexities of the process of formalisation. Chapter 3 looks into the relationship between proofs and the development of the mathematical concepts that feature in them. I deploy Waismann's notion of open texture in the case of mathematical concepts, and discuss both Lakatos and Kneebone's dialectical philosophies of mathematics. I then argue that we can apply work from conceptual engineering to the relationship between formal and informal mathematics. The fourth chapter argues for the importance of mathematical knowledge-how and emphasises the primary role of the activity of proving in securing mathematical knowledge. In the final chapter I develop an account of mathematical knowledge based on virtue epistemology, which I argue provides a better view of proofs and mathematical rigour.
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Kerr, Andrew Nicholas. "Human capital, informality and labour market outcomes in sub-Saharan Africa." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2011. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:d5ef74f9-8fc0-45ff-9c30-b15de04b4e25.
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In this thesis I explore three topics in labour economics, using micro data from South Africa and Tanzania. South Africa suffers from extremely high income inequality, in part as a result of comprehensive Apartheid-era racial discrimination. The first topic explores possible explanations for the extremely large earnings differences across different types of employment for black South Africans, using the KwaZulu-Natal Income Dynamics Study data. I analyse the relative importance of individual ability and institutions, including public sector wage setting and trade unions, in determining earnings. My results suggest that human capital explains much of the earnings differentials within the private sector, including union premiums, but cannot explain the large premiums for public sector workers. Self-employment is very common in urban Tanzania but, unlike South Africa, survey data show that there are large overlaps in the distribution of earnings in private wage employment and self-employment. This suggests that self-employment represents a viable alternative to wage employment in small, low productivity firms for the majority of urban Tanzanians. In chapter three I build an equilibrium search model of the urban Tanzanian labour market to explain the choice of wage and self-employment and the variation in earnings across and within these sectors. In the final topic I explore the effect of education on earnings in Tanzania. Estimating the returns to education has stimulated much recent work in applied econometrics as researchers advance their understanding of the effect of individual heterogeneity on the possibility of estimating the returns to education. In my attempt to purge estimates of the return to education of the influence of individual heterogeneity, I use an education reform in Tanzania as a natural experiment that provides exogenous variation in education. When using Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) I find high and strongly convex, increasing returns to education. My best attempt at separating out the effect of individual heterogeneity suggests that returns are still high but that they may actually be concave.
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Bari, Arezu Imran. "Understanding urban informality : everyday life in informal urban settlements in Pakistan." Thesis, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/10443/3320.
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Rapid urbanisation and severe housing shortages help explain why informal settlements of self-built housing are widespread in Pakistan today. Failure to ensure an adequate supply of affordable housing has led to the steady encroachment of state-owned and private vacant land for informal dwelling. Current estimates are that 67% of the urban population of Pakistan lives in unrecognised settlements (UN-Habitat, 2013). Urban informality is arguably under researched within the South Asian context, particularly Pakistan. This study considers how everyday life unfolds through various forms of extra-legal, social and discursive regulations in this context of pervasive informality. This exploration is developed for the particular case of the Siddiquia Mill Colony, Faisalabad City. A central premise is that we need to develop new theoretical analytic tools that reflect current global urban trends in order to shift the perception of informality from one of deviance and disorganisation to one of alternative functionality and complementarity. The vast majority of new housing and urban economic opportunities around the world occur in informal sectors and unregulated settings. Contrary to conventional understanding, particularly in relation to South Asian informality, the research findings highlight that informal housing and irregular settlements function as enduring modes of urban development, inadequately portrayed as symptoms of economic backwardness. The study provides concrete examples of how informality is co-produced with formal urban development, often filling the institutional, structural and administrative gaps that state-led planning practices leave behind. The empirical research draws on a mix of ethnographic data from a detailed survey of household housing characteristics, in-depth interviews and immersive observations, in a two-tier research design. The findings reinforce the notion that informality is ordinary rather than deviant. Inhabitants exhibit a sense of attachment, a recognition of alternative property rights and a perceived sense of entitlement in relation to their properties. It is noted that, while a desire to ‘own’ their property could be perceived as falling in line with neo-liberal ideals, the drivers and objectives underpinning ‘ownership’ in this context are far removed from the desire, or need, to be part of a capitalistic, neo-liberal, propertied citizenship. Rather, these aspirations are based on ideas of security and perpetuity. This is evident through a close reading of well-defined but complex webs of horizontal and vertical social relations. Social relations internally differentiate the inhabitants of Siddiquia Mill, highlighting the persistence of unequal power relations. The insights gained from this case study contribute deeper understanding in geography and planning debates by demonstrating the multiple ways that urban informality functions simultaneously as a social field of competition and cooperation. This work makes two significant contributions to scholarship. First, it explores the previously neglected context of informality in urban Pakistan, which is quite different from informality in other, more-well documented countries of South Asia. Second, it argues in favour of informality as a counter to neo-liberalist ideology.
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Bruhn, Miriam, and Jan Loeprick. "Small Business Tax Policy, Informality, and Tax Evasion - Evidence from Georgia." WU Vienna University of Economics and Business, Universität Wien, 2014. http://epub.wu.ac.at/4307/1/SSRN%2Did2500783.pdf.
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Using a panel of administrative data and regression discontinuity analysis, this paper examines how the
introduction of preferential tax regimes for Georgian micro and small businesses in 2010 affects formal
firm creation and tax compliance. The results show that the new tax regime for micro businesses
increased the number of newly registered formal firms by 18-30 percent below the eligibility threshold
during the first year of the reform, but not in subsequent years. The analysis does not find an effect of
the new tax regime for small businesses on formal firm creation in any year. Policy makers are often
concerned about abuse risks stemming from differentiated tax treatment of micro and small businesses.
The analysis in this paper reveals reduced tax compliance in 2010 around the micro business eligibility
threshold, but does not find significant evidence of reduced compliance by Georgian firms in later years.
The results also do not show any significant evidence of strategic sorting around the regime eligibility
thresholds. (authors' abstract)Series: WU International Taxation Research Paper Series
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Furuta, Manabu. "Three Essays on the Indian Manufacturing: Wage Inequality, Export and Informality." 京都大学 (Kyoto University), 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/2433/225372.
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Fredriksson, Anders. "Bureaucracy, Informality and Taxation : Essays in Development Economics and Public Finance." Doctoral thesis, Stockholm : Institute for international Economic Studies, Stockholm University, 2009. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:su:diva-27256.
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Tkhir, Anna-Mariia [Verfasser]. "A Macroeconomic Analysis of Tax Evasion and Informality / Anna-Mariia Tkhir." Konstanz : KOPS Universität Konstanz, 2020. http://d-nb.info/121418054X/34.
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García, Rincón María Fernanda. "Reproducing informality : interaction between street vendors and the state in Caracas, Venezuela." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2007. https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/283827.
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Hassan, Abdullahi Ali. "Enterprising Somali refugees in Cape Town: beyond informality, beyond the spaza shop." Master's thesis, Faculty of Science, 2019. https://hdl.handle.net/11427/31811.
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Since the dawn of democracy, South Africa has received high numbers of refugees from around the African continent in particular. One of the largest groups of refugees, Somalis, have established numerous enterprises in South African cities, concentrated in micro and small business sectors, particularly in the grocery and textile industries. The presence of Somali entrepreneurs and their role in the South African economy is contested, framed in relation to township informal economies and debates on xenophobia. Research to-date, however, focuses almost exclusively on Somali informal micro-enterprises in the spaza shop sector. To address this gap in the research and debate, this thesis examines Somali entrepreneurs, their development of varied formal enterprises, and their business strategies. I demonstrate in that these small formal businesses operate beyond the micro township-based informal spaza sector, building networks between township and city formal economies, and linking multiple economic sectors. In doing so, they act as a medium between producers of goods and general city consumers. The research demonstrates that Somali immigrant entrepreneurs can be considered what Bonacich (1973) describes as “middleman minorities.” This argument builds on qualitative research in Cape Town with Somali refugees who own formal small businesses that employ between five and a hundred employees. I draw on their histories, examine the evolution of their businesses, to substantiate how as newcomers - refugees, with limited knowledge about South African business dynamics, and little access to resources of the country - they managed to find their feet in business in varied ways. I show how Bellville as Cape Town’s Little Mogadishu, acts as a business hub and melting pot, a place to meet, to work together and connect their businesses to the rest of the city. From these histories, experiences, and networks, I analyse the business strategies that Somali entrepreneurs draw on, which include partnerships, shareholding, the building of trust, and their own mobility. I also investigate what enabled them to get a foot in the door when they first arrived, find new business opportunities, and access new markets in the city, region, and in some cases beyond. I argue that Somali immigrant entrepreneurs have created a diverse set of complex formal businesses, ranging from the sale of textiles, the processing of animal products, to consumer household goods. Through these businesses, these entrepreneurs have created jobs, new economic networks, new products, and extended markets, as well as physical retail and wholesale spaces. In making this argument, this research offers a better understanding of entrepreneurial work and its logics in the Cape Town Somali immigrant community. Their own experiences as entrepreneurs, as well as their business strategies, exceed by far narratives of informality, the spaza shop sector, and experiences of violence and xenophobia. This research broadens understandings of immigrant entrepreneurial activity in South African cities, and shift existing negative perceptions that depict refugees and immigrants as burdens on host communities and cities. I hope the research might also help inform the formulation of relevant policies for transitioning informal micro-enterprises in the country into small formal enterprises, one strategy that might address the critical issue of high unemployment in South African cities and society.
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Usman, Mohammad. "Ghanaians in the Bronx : (il)legal status and pathways to housing." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2018. https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/271128.
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How does legal status shape access to housing? This research explores the housing journeys of Ghanaian migrants in the borough of the Bronx in New York City to answer that question. The aim of this research is to understand the processes by which poor documented and undocumented migrants access housing, and to uncover the hidden, informal sub-markets that they occupy. Data were collected over a 14-month period of fieldwork, through 2014 and 2015, using a mixed methods approach. Quantitative data were drawn from secondary datasets and qualitative data were obtained from in-depth interviews with migrants, housing providers, and intermediaries. This study adapts urban informality theory by adjoining it with the concepts of migrant enclaves, social capital, and survival strategies. Urban informality describes informal settlements in the Global South that arise due to suspended sovereignty, where the state allows settlements to form to facilitate rapid urbanisation at minimal institutional cost. Urban informality occurs in the Bronx differently than in the Global South: migrants do not construct housing but rather obtain units on the formal market that they then sublet on their own informal market. Complicit actors, including profit-seeking providers and indifferent public authorities, allow this informal market to form. The findings show that, surprisingly, legal status is not an organizing framework in the housing market. Rather, the strength of one's social ties to the Ghanaian migrant community strongly determines how housing is accessed. For instance, undocumented migrants report better housing outcomes (lower rents and higher satisfaction) compared to their documented counterparts because they have more robust connections to other migrants. The only migrant group that can overcome weak social network ties and still readily access affordable housing are unmarried female Ghanaian migrants, as they are desired as household labourers and potential spouses. This research further finds that documented and undocumented migrants are similar in one important respect, they resist support from public institutions: housing courts, social service agencies, and elected representatives. This stems from pervasive myths and misinformation regarding government: migrants tend to believe that public authorities seek to deport them or otherwise prohibit their families from immigrating to the U.S., and that they only truly serve Hispanics, who are in the majority in the Bronx. This results in avoidable impoverishment, particularly among documented migrants who decline to seek public benefits to which they are legally qualified and entitled. This study contributes to knowledge with its empirical findings, methodology, and theoretical developments. The findings deepen our understanding of poor migrant communities residing in the Global North, and the implications of legal status for housing access. The methodology provides a novel approach for uncovering and examining allocation processes in hidden markets. The adapted urban informality model gives new theoretical insights into the relationship between formality and informality, which has further applications in housing studies and urban economics.
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Yang, Yang. "Social software supported children's education out of school : informality and transition of learning." Thesis, University of Nottingham, 2011. http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/11861/.
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This thesis is motivated to harness UK children’s enthusiasm and energy on using social software to connect with each other. The overarching research aim of this thesis is to investigate how social software can cultivate children aged 11 – 14 as a community of learners out of school, in order to support their education. Two key issues: informality of out-of-school learning and transitions of learning practices across home and school, are identified as research challenges. Community of Practice is proposed as the theoretical construct to open up and provide useful coverage to respond to these two challenges. In five case studies, various methodologies are utilised to investigate the actual uses that children make of social software as well as to explore the networked dynamics within a community that mediate the fate of technology. First, UK children’s use of a nationwide homework message board in two subjects: Maths and English is investigated. Findings suggest that seeking for help is the prevailing concern expressed by the children, when they confront their private study out of school. A strong emotional tone is evoked in the board, which sustains children’s co-participation as a community. Second, whether and how an online whiteboard can support children’s GCSE Maths exam revision with a teacher during out-of-school hours is explored. Findings shed light on the difficulty in nurturing a community of learners through social software and .the role of a teacher’s online presence out of school. The third study explores how a group of students and a teacher are cultivated as a learning community across classroom (physical) and a social networking site (virtual). Findings suggest that the informality of socio-emotional chat, content production and identity construction helps to identify the non-academic dimension of being a learner within a community. In order to cultivate a learning community, it is suggested that children should be supported to form a community that will function better in the class rather than just being put into continuous tuition hours with extra teacher support out of school. Findings also discover the benefit to access a teacher via multiple communication channels. Furthermore, in an attempt to illuminate the underlying networked dynamics in a social software-supported community, Chinese children using a homework message board is investigated. Findings suggest that the specific emotional tone revealed in the UK message board is related to the UK children’s particular perspectives in learning and knowledge. Finally, interviews with two cultural groups of children: English and Chinese are conducted, in which the children mapped their in-school and out-of-school activities and their personal preferences of technologies. Findings suggest that the fate of a supportive technology must be judged with a firm grasp of the learning culture that it is implemented.
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Thompson, Junior Charles Ocran Kofi 1978. "Informality and tax revenue in Ghana = Informalidade e arrecadação de impostos em Gana." [s.n.], 2014. http://repositorio.unicamp.br/jspui/handle/REPOSIP/286422.
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Orientador: Anselmo Luis dos SantosDissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Economia
Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-25T16:08:24Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 ThompsonJunior_CharlesOcranKofi_M.pdf: 1303825 bytes, checksum: 47abd6bf7cbf879fbdc744f26bace8d3 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2014
Resumo: O setor informal em Gana é muito grande e emprega a maior parte da força de trabalho do país tanto nas atividades agrícolas quanto nas demais, mas ainda assim contribui muito pouco em termos de receita tributária. O objetivo de todo país em desenvolvimento é o crescimento de sua economia através do uso de suas receitas internas e a minimização do uso de empréstimos e subvenções que trazem dificuldades para o país. A maneira mais importante de tornar isso possível é através do uso da receita fiscal, ferramenta fundamental para a construção e sustentação das economias nacionais. Uma das áreas que exigem atenção nesse sentido é o setor informal. De uma população estimada de 1.5 milhão de ganenses que pagam impostos diretos, o setor informal representa menos de 5% desse número. O ponto central dessa tese é o potencial de contribuição do setor informal para os cofres públicos, uma vez que esse apresenta grande potencial de crescimento e geração de receita, especialmente se for levada em consideração a parcela de população que obtém altos rendimentos e tem condições de pagar impostos, mais ainda não o faz. Para que o governo possa aumentar sua receita fiscal sem recorrer ao aumento das taxas é necessário ampliar a rede fiscal para nela incluir todos aqueles que deveriam pagar impostos. Gana utiliza o sistema progressivo de impostos, o que assegura que os impostos sejam proporcionais à renda. Isso significa, portanto, que a carga tributária é uma responsabilidade compartilhada por todos os cidadãos, e o setor informal não é exceção
Abstract: The informal Sector in Ghana by its size is very huge and employs the largest number of the country¿s labour force in both Agriculture and Non-agriculture activities yet, contribute very little in terms of tax revenue. It is the aim of every developing country to grow its economy by using more of its own internally generated revenues and to minimize or do away with securing loans and grants from donors which brings a lot of hardship on the country. The most important way of carrying out this is through the use of "Taxation Revenue" which is the fundamental tool for building and sustaining national economies. One area that needs concentration in this regard is the informal sector. Out of an estimated 1.5million Ghanaian tax population paying direct taxes, the informal sector consists less than 5 percent of the number. This thesis focuses on the informal sectors potential to contribute substantially into the tax revenue coffers, since the sector is highly potential in the growth and revenue generation, especially those in the high income spectrum of the sector who has the condition to pay taxes, yet are not paying. In order for the government to increase its tax revenue potential without increasing the tax rate is to widen the tax net to capture all those who are to pay tax. Ghana is using the progressive tax system in its direct tax administration, which ensures that the more your income the more tax you pay and the lower your income the lower tax you pay. It¿s therefore means that the tax burden is a shared responsibility of all citizens of the country for which the informal sector is not an exception
Mestrado
Economia Social e do Trabalho
Mestre em Desenvolvimento Econômico
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Vu, Thanh Thuy. "The dynamics of informality and its implications for a new economic political order." Thesis, Paris 10, 2014. http://www.theses.fr/2014PA100104/document.
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La présente thèse explore la dynamique des institutions informelles dans la gouvernance nationale et mondiale et l'ajustement de l'ordre politico-économique, dans un pays en transition et à l'échelle mondiale dans un contexte de crise financière internationale, en utilisant l'approche institutionnelle comparative. Elle adopte le point de vue de la nouvelle économie institutionnelle (New Institutional Economics - NIE) afin d'étudier comment différentes formes de gouvernance, notamment les mécanismes de gouvernance informels, émergent et fonctionnent dans diverses circonstances. Le chapitre deux fournit la preuve de la prédominance des relations accommodante et concurrente entre les systèmes de fourniture de services publics et d'ordre public, qui sont formellement et informellement décentralisés dans soixante-quatre provinces vietnamiennes. Notre analyse de l’«informalité» dans le chapitre trois soutient l'argument selon lequel les mécanismes formels ne sont pas suffisants pour inciter les acteurs publics à assumer leur pleine responsabilité, mais doivent être accompagnés de ceux informels pour combler les déficits de responsabilité du système formel. L'analyse empirique de quarante-cinq pays développés et en développement dans le chapitre quatre découvre que la non-congruence institutionnelle, en général, a un effet complémentaire sur la taille de l'économie informelle, mais agit comme un substitut dans les pays qui ont un faible niveau de non-congruence, une bonne gouvernance de la corruption, ou une grande pro-activité dans la prise d'initiatives visant à réduire l'écart de perception de la légitimité des activités économiques informellesThis dissertation explores the dynamics of informal institutions in national and global governance and the adjustment of the economic political order in a transition country as well as on the global scale after two recent global financial crises, using the comparative institutional approach. It adopts the perspective of the New Institutional Economics (NIE) to study how alternative forms of governance, particularly, informal mechanisms of governance, emerge and work in various circumstances. Chapter two provides evidence to the prevalence of the accommodating and competing relationships between the formally and informally decentralized systems of providing public services and public order in 64 provinces in Vietnam. Our “informality” analysis in chapter three has supported the argument that formal mechanisms alone are not sufficient to create incentives for public actors to make private efforts to full accountability, but needs accompanying with other informal ones to fill in accountability deficits of the formal system. The empirical analysis of 45 developed and developing countries in chapter four finds that institutional incongruence, in general, has a complementary effect on the size of the informal economy, but acts as a substitute in those countries that have a low level of incongruence, good governance of corruption, or high proactivity in taking initiatives to minimize the perception gap about the legitimacy of informal economic activities
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Chagnollaud, Fanny. "La comunidad andine, du village au quartier : l’invention d’une culture andine urbaine à Ayacucho (Pérou)." Thesis, Paris 10, 2012. http://www.theses.fr/2012PA100036.
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Située dans les Andes sud-centrales du Pérou, la ville d’Ayacucho a connu une expansion urbaine accélérée à partir des années 1950, nourrie par l’arrivée massive de migrants andins originaires des districts ruraux de la région. Aujourd’hui peuplée de plus de 151.000 habitants, elle apparaît comme un ensemble de quartiers agglomérés autour du centre historique colonial. La très grande majorité de ces quartiers est le résultat d’une invasion collective de terrains organisée par les migrants. Ce travail analyse les processus de formation et les modalités du fonctionnement quotidien de ces quartiers. Il montre comment, pour les fonder et assurer leur pérennité, les migrants ont reproduit les structures et les mécanismes sociaux andins traditionnels en les accommodant au milieu urbain. L’objectif de cette étude est de montrer comment ces migrants ont ainsi inventé une culture andine urbaine. Ces quartiers qu’ils ont construits constituent en effet une transposition en milieu urbain de la « comunidad » andine, généralement considérée comme une institution ruraleLocated in the south-central Andes of Peru, the city of Ayacucho underwent an accelerated urbanization process from the 1950’s, nourished by the massive arrival of immigrants from the Andean rural districts of the area. Peopled today with more than 151.000 inhabitants, it appears like a conglomerate of settlements gathered around the historical colonial centre of the city. A large majority of these settlements is the result of collective lands invasions organized by the immigrants. This work analyses the formation process and daily functioning of these settlements. It shows how, to found them and ensure their permanence, the immigrants reproduced the traditional Andean social structures and mechanisms, adapting them to the urban context. The objective of this study is to show that, by doing so, these immigrants invented an urban Andean culture. Those settlements they built are indeed a transposition in the urban environment of the Andean “comunidad”, generally considered a rural institution
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Crossley, Paul. "Cultures of informality : Informal livelihoods and social reproduction in the barrios of culhaucan, Mexico city." Thesis, University of Manchester, 2009. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.499931.
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Gupte, Jaideep. "Linking urban civil violence, extralegality and informality : credibility and policing in south-central Mumbai, India." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2011. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.543675.
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Chambers, Thomas. "'Carving out niches' : informality, work and migration in a Muslim craft community of North India." Thesis, University of Sussex, 2015. http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/54470/.
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Based on 18 months of fieldwork this thesis focuses on work, life and migration in a Muslim wood crafting community of Saharanpur (North India). Drawing on ethnographic and other material regarding Indian Muslims, artisans, informal economies and ‘informality' more broadly, the thesis addresses four primary questions: What does it mean to work in an economic space where moves towards labour informality, as played out in post-liberalisation economies globally, have always been the primary means of organisation? Are workers in such spaces better equipped to deal with informality? Where state regulation has always been partial, what regulates everyday economic activity? Are these spaces isolated, in decline and increasingly marginalised, or are they highly connected and central to contemporary capitalism? In this context the thesis follows the lives and stories of craft workers across a variety of ‘niches of production' which are defined through religious, gender-based and affective factors. The thesis utilises ‘informality', not just to understand work and conditions of employment, but also networks, connections, niches and spaces of production and exchange. It begins with the history of a community and industry that has been shaped by the colonial experience, the upheavals of partition, political changes and economic liberalisation. The thesis explores the complexities of a supply chain filled with ambiguous actors and the connections and networks within which craft workers operate. It traces the influence of Islam and explores connections of religion and friendship. It follows pathways of migration across the country and to the Gulf. Whilst playing out within a gendered and stratified social fabric within which production is embedded, the long experience of operating under conditions of informality has given workers in Saharanpur certain attributes useful in negotiating the economic terrain. However, it also makes them accepting of these conditions. Connections, built on Muslim and other networks, enables workers to retain a high degree of geographical mobility. Whilst there are very specific constraints emanating from their Muslim identity, these networks create certain possibilities for connecting with other people and places. Carefully cultivated links of community, neighbourhood and friendship provide an important resource through which work can be found and mutual support provided. Yet there is a duality present throughout, with these same networks simultaneously acting as a means of incorporation into chains of supply. Against this complex backdrop the thesis explores the ways in which workers engage with networks, connections, niches and spaces of production and exchange. It considers the constraints and potentialities therein. It makes its original contribution to knowledge on two counts. Firstly, and primarily, it provides an empirical contribution by providing a thickly descriptive account of lives in an industry which has received little ethnographic attention. Secondly, it utilises circulatory understandings of the production of capitalism to show how spaces such as Saharanpur's wood industry are not marginal but form an important part of the way capitalism works and how such spaces have played a role in shaping global processes of labour force informalisation.
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Wang, Yucan. "Combining an enterprise resource planning system and informality : a study of efficiency and flexibility complimentarity." Thesis, Aston University, 2014. http://publications.aston.ac.uk/24365/.
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One of the current research trends in Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) involves examining the critical factors for its successful implementation. However, such research is limited to system implementation, not focusing on the flexibility of ERP to respond to changes in business. Therefore, this study explores a combination system, made up of an ERP and informality, intended to provide organisations with efficient and flexible performance simultaneously. In addition, this research analyses the benefits and challenges of using the system. The research was based on socio-technical system (STS) theory which contains two dimensions: 1) a technical dimension which evaluates the performance of the system; and 2) a social dimension which examines the impact of the system on an organisation. A mixed method approach has been followed in this research. The qualitative part aims to understand the constraints of using a single ERP system, and to define a new system corresponding to these problems. To achieve this goal, four Chinese companies operating in different industries were studied, all of which faced challenges in using an ERP system due to complexity and uncertainty in their business environments. The quantitative part contains a discrete-event simulation study that is intended to examine the impact of operational performance when a company implements the hybrid system in a real-life situation. Moreover, this research conducts a further qualitative case study, the better to understand the influence of the system in an organisation. The empirical aspect of the study reveals that an ERP with pre-determined business activities cannot react promptly to unanticipated changes in a business. Incorporating informality into an ERP can react to different situations by using different procedures that are based on the practical knowledge of frontline employees. Furthermore, the simulation study shows that the combination system can achieve a balance between efficiency and flexibility. Unlike existing research, which emphasises a continuous improvement in the IT functions of an enterprise system, this research contributes to providing a definition of a new system in theory, which has mixed performance and contains both the formal practices embedded in an ERP and informal activities based on human knowledge. It supports both cost-efficiency in executing business transactions and flexibility in coping with business uncertainty. This research also indicates risks of using the system, such as using an ERP with limited functions; a high cost for performing informally; and a low system acceptance, owing to a shift in organisational culture. With respect to practical contribution, this research suggests that companies can choose the most suitable enterprise system approach in accordance with their operational strategies. The combination system can be implemented in a company that needs to operate a medium amount of volume and variety. By contrast, the traditional ERP system is better suited in a company that operates a high-level volume market, while an informal system is more suitable for a firm with a requirement for a high level of variety.
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Gonzalez, Julio. "The politics and institutions of informality and street vending in Mexico : the case of Mexico City." Thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science (University of London), 2016. http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/3387/.
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The informal sector—which includes informal street vending—comprises any economic activity that takes place outside the regulatory norms of the state—the evasion of tax codes, zoning ordinances, etc.—but does not include the provision of explicitly illegal goods or services. The phenomenon of ‘informal street vending’ has generally been analyzed from a strictly economic point of view. This research examines informal street vending in Mexico, particularly in Mexico City, from political and historical perspectives. The thesis’ main goal is to learn how increasing political competition—resulting from democratization and alternation of political parties in power—affected the politics and policies of informality (informal street vending) in Mexico. To this purpose, this work carries out a historical analysis of informal street vending and the policies and regulations implemented over time in Mexico City; a detailed comparative political analysis of the ex-ante and ex-post situation of informal groups and organizations going through the democratization process and the alternation in power that occurred in Mexico at city and federal levels in 1997 and 2000, respectively; and a case study to examine the largest and most powerful street vending organization in Mexico City. The thesis concludes that increasing political competition—resulting from democratization and alternation in power— did not result in an improvement in the capacity of the Mexico City government or the federal government to control informality and street vending. While democratization and political competition opened the doors for representation and more political participation by street vendors, it also set the conditions for the expansion of the bargaining power of vendor leaders, the multiplication of vendor organizations, the exacerbation of the political struggle between rival vendor groups, and the weakening of the government capacity to implement policies to tackle informality and street vending.
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Rojas, Rivera Angela M. "On the relationship between targeted redistribution and economic informality in democracies : a theoretical and empirical exploration." Thesis, University of Warwick, 2012. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/45803/.
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Is there a causal link between corrupt machine politics and informality? Historical and empirical evidence support a positive answer to this question. The first paper offers a theoretical perspective, which more generally asks how redistributive politics in a democracy affects the allocation of factors in a dual economy with a modern and a traditional sector. A model of electoral competition with endogenous group size and output shows that electoral political agency through targeted redistribution (sector-specific tax rates) can either promote or discourage the growth of the modern sector. However, the effect of changes in sector size on total output is ambiguous and depends on parameter combinations. These insights contrast with traditional models in redistributive politics in which group sizes are exogenous and allocation effects are overlooked. In this framework, economic forces at work that come from productivity differentials and endowment distribution are able to outweigh the effects of the ideological density. The second paper explores evidence from 64 democracies through an instrumental variable approach. The hypothesis is that machine politics shapes institutional quality in democracies and thereby determines informality. The conceptual framework is based on the political exchange space and the portfolio theory of electoral investment. Machine politics is proxied by electoral risk, and institutional quality is measured by the index of the rule of law. Instruments of machine politics are searched for among de-jure political institutions. This analysis confirms results already discussed in the related literature on government quality, determinants of informality and the effect of electoral rules on corruption, however, the main contribution of this research is to bring political structure into the picture, here the party system, insofar as it is a key intermediating mechanism between political institutions (de-facto and de-jure) and social outcomes (political and economic). In other studies the political structure is a black box that readily disappears when estimating reduced-form equations.
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Storey, Angela Diane. "Infrastructure and Informality: Contesting the Neoliberal Politics of Participation and Belonging in Cape Town, South Africa." Diss., The University of Arizona, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/612372.
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This dissertation examines the production of an everyday politics of infrastructure within informal settlements in the Khayelitsha area of Cape Town, South Africa. As residents attempt to meet water, sanitation, and electricity needs through assemblages of informal service connections, in addition to limited formal services provided by the municipality, their material exclusions are articulated as evidence of persistent political marginality. Residents engage in multiple modes of politicized action seeking expansion to formal infrastructure and full inclusion in the promises of citizenship. However, they also face an array of complications created by municipal reliance upon neoliberal policies, practices, and logics. Despite a nominal emphasis on participatory processes of governance and development, municipal approaches to service provision and community engagement produce further marginalization. In order to theorize the intersection of neoliberal urban governance and democratic practice, this dissertation examines participation as the result of complex interactions between everyday experience, urban governance, circulating moral logics, and the work of civil society. The realm of politics emerges as one unbound by parties, NGOs, or social movements; instead, it is read dialectically both into and from the landscape of informality. Across three articles, this dissertation examines participation as a contested terrain of politicized action, shaped by neoliberal practices of governance, post-colonial tensions, and uneven social acknowledgement of experience, knowledge, and action.
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Nogueira, Mara. "Who has the right to remain in place? : informality, citizenship and belonging in Belo Horizonte, Brazil." Thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science (University of London), 2017. http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/3669/.
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The thesis looks at three conflicts related to the 2014 World Cup preparation in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. In each of the cases, affected groups – informal workers, informal residents and middle-class citizens – engage with the state to claim rights over space. It examines how the entanglements between social class and legal/institutional developments engendered through “peripheral urbanisation” shape the capacities of those groups to affect formal/informal boundaries and have their demands legitimated. This research draws on the findings from a fieldwork in Belo Horizonte, which lasted eight months in total between 2014 and 2016 and involved archival research, participant observation and semi-structured interviews with relevant actors. Three cases are considered, which include: the Mineirão stadium redevelopment that displaced a group of informal workers while creating a conflict in a middle-class neighbourhood; the demolition of an informal settlement to make way for a transport infrastructure project; the construction of a hotel in a middle-class area against the will of local residents. The thesis presents three key findings. Firstly, the urban space production is affected by citizens’ capacity to engage with the state. While the state-society boundaries are blurry, citizens are unevenly empowered to have their demands validated and avoid displacement, i.e. the loss of place. Secondly, while informal residents have their rights partially recognised thanks to the “insurgent citizenship” struggles of the past, informal workers are not entitled to compensation because of the disassociation of work informality debates from spatial considerations. Finally, middle-class politics matter, as middle-class residents are better equipped to validate their claims and protect their place in the city. The research contributes to recent postcolonial debates on urban space production and informality. I show that both informal working and housing practices are interconnected through the place-making strategies of the urban poor as well as of the urban middle-class, all of which generate important implications for the reproduction of socio-spatial segregation and thinking of the Brazilian urban future.
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Manda, Mtafu Almiton Zeleza Chinguwa. "Understanding the context of informality: urban planning under different land tenure systems in Mzuzu city, Malawi." Doctoral thesis, Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment, 2019. http://hdl.handle.net/11427/31107.
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A key feature of urbanisation in African and many other Global South cities is the prevalence and persistence of urban informal settlements. Despite planning attempts and claims to directly address and contain informal settlements, informality nonetheless continues to be the dominant form of shelter. However, there is insufficient understanding of how and why informality persists in the African urban context and why urban planning seems unable to engage with this aspect of urban growth and change. This situation also prevails in Malawian cities. This study sought to explore and understand the role of state-society engagements in the production and proliferation of housing informality in Mzuzu City. The thesis is informed by a recognition that planning theory has predominantly relied on Global North (Western) ideologies such as Habermesian inspired collaborative and communicative planning approaches which argue that consensus can realise planning goals and visions. The appeal, and hence adoption and application of these approaches in the Global South have largely failed to deliver the kind of planning outcomes seen in the Global North for many reasons, including the different political power dynamics and colonial historical contexts within which planning operates. The state-society engagements in the Global South contexts show that the state, rather than regulating development, is implicated in the production of informality in ways similar to those of inhabitants. These contexts point to the need to develop planning concepts which have a better relevance in rapidly growing and under-resourced urban settlements in the Global South. The thesis contributes to an emerging body of knowledge that has come to be called the Global South Planning Theory Project. The scholars promoting this project argue for the importance of context in planning theory development and in this case the need to consider the contribution of the Global South to planning and understanding of the urbanisation processes. In this regard, the thesis draws on various Global South concepts such as informality as a mode of urbanisation (Roy, 2009), gray spaces (Yiftachel, 2009), conflicting rationalities (Watson 2003), quiet encroachment (Bayat, 2010), insurgency (Holston, 2008) and hidden transcripts (Scott,1990) to frame the analysis of housing informality in Mzuzu City. The case study method (Yin 2014) was used to collect and analyse data from three informal settlements of Luwinga, Salisburyline and Geisha each having developed on land of a specific tenure: customary, public and private, respectively. Interviews and discussions were held with state officials, chiefs, block leaders, clan leaders, and senior citizens as well as groups of inhabitants in form of focus group discussions. Observations, literature review and archival data supplemented the information from the interviews and discussions. The analysis of the results indicates that state-society engagement in the informal settlements is about the application of the various strategies by each side in seeking to either achieve planned orderly urban growth or the right to land and life in the city. The study also shows that these strategies manifest, from the perspective of the state, through several laws, policies, regulations, and an assortment of practices that the planning system uses as a tool of the state. Among the state strategies are threats of evictions, demolitions and organising citizens to participate in development committees. However, when the state utilises these strategies, it is not always for the achievement of planned orderly urban growth as professed, but on many occasions for revenue generation through property taxation, for land control, for vote-gaining or for personal gain. On the other hand, inhabitants use threats of court action, violence, collaboration with state actors, hidden transcripts (Scott, 1990), spatial protests ( Yakobi, 2004) and quiet encroachment (Bayat, 2010) to achieve their objectives to retain their land rights, to provide their basic need of shelter and to stay in the city. The inhabitants seeking survival strategies were also found not immune to the clientelist ambitions of local politicians. The study noted the shifting state discourses of informal settlements from a view of them as utter illegality to gradual political acceptance or regularisation of their existence. Finally, the study found many aspects of rationality conflicts, which either occurred between the state and society directly, among state actors, among citizen actors and across the two spheres. Within the state, ethical conflicts in which state officials deliberately frustrated the visioning of planned orderly urban growth were found to be rampant. State-society engagements therefore can be said to be a contributor to housing informality. In the case of Mzuzu, these engagements occur in multiple settlements regardless of land tenure situation. These engagements suggest that rationality conflicts occur within multi-layered settings, across state-society spheres as well as beyond specific project interventions implemented within single settlements.
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Chigwenya, Average. "Informality and right to the city: Contestations for safe and liveable spaces in Masvingo City, Zimbabwe." University of the Western Cape, 2019. http://hdl.handle.net/11394/6940.
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Philosophiae Doctor - PhDInformal sector operators in many cities of the global South face extensive harassment, criminalization and restricted access to public spaces despite the important role the sector is playing in urban development. Using Lefebvre’s theory of right to the city the study aimed to investigate how the city of Masvingo has embraced urban informality. The study also examined how informal sector operators in the city of Masvingo have been accessing –urban space and creating opportunities for the informal sector to access such space. The study also examined how the provision of essential services in the city has been extended to the people in the informal sector as a way of granting them their right to urban social and infrastructural services. The research took a survey design where a cross section of Masvingo city, including the city centre, residential areas and industrial areas, was sampled for the study. Methodologically the research used a mixed method approach to data collection and analysis, where both qualitative and quantitative methods were used. A questionnaire survey constituted the quantitative component of the study and it was administered to the informal sector operators, In-depth interviews and field observations were at the core of the qualitative methods that were used in the research. In-depth interviews were done with key informants in the city and these included officials in the city council, government ministries, and leaders of informal sector associations and civic groups in the city. Field observations were done in areas where the informal activities were carried out to assess the provision of services and the environment in which informal activities were operating. Data collected through interviews and field observations was analysed qualitatively and the SPSS was used for quantitative data analysis. The research found that informal operators in the city of Masvingo are being disenfranchised of their right to the city in various ways. They are not afforded the right to express their lives in the city centre as the city authorities are determined to flush out all informal structures and activities from the city centre in line with their modern city goals. The planning system in the city does not recognise informal activities as approved land user in the city centre and they do not plan for them in new spatial development projects. However, informal activities continue to occupy contested spaces, where they are in direct contravention of existing regulatory framework and this has been used to marginalise them and deny them of their right to the city. Right to the city calls for all urban residents to have access to the city centre and that access to city space should be based on use values rather than exchange values (Lefebvre 1996). Also, informal sector operators based at various sites in the city are generally denied access to essential services such as waste collection, provision of water and sewer services.
2020-08-31
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Achwoka, Jacqueline Walubwa. "Recognition of Informal Norms in Creating Resilient Water Management Structures : The Case of Soweto East, Nairobi." Thesis, Bordeaux 3, 2016. http://www.theses.fr/2016BOR30066/document.
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Les villes sont constituées du regroupement d'ensembles cohérents qui coexistent de façon apparemment paisible ou dans la tolérance. En raison de leur nature et des politiques néolibérales qui les régissent, les services urbains sont supposés être fournis dans de bonnes quantités et au bon moment pour tous, ce qui n'est pas toujours le cas car de nombreux intérêts sont en jeu, s'opposant aux pouvoirs en place. L'eau, un bien élémentaire et un droit inscrit dans les constitutions de nombreux pays, est encore loin d'être un bien pour tous; elle est au coeur de cette thèse qui présente une étude du cas de Soweto East. Soweto est un «ghetto» controversé, un espace systématiquement marginalisé où les résidents souffrent de négligence historique et d'injustice dans la fourniture de biens et de services urbains de base, un site où plusieurs interventions de développement ont échoué, où l'injustice urbaine nie le droit de demeurer dans la ville. Soweto a été choisi pour montrer comment la gouvernance de l'eau peut assurer la résilience et la durabilité dans la ligne des objectifs de développement durable. En utilisant le Cadre Analytique de la Gouvernance, cette thèse observe des espaces et des lieux très discutés, où les habitants se sont démocratiquement organisés pour prendre en charge leur destin en créant des systèmes qui utilisent à la fois les normes légales et des normes informelles dans des mesures différentes, pour veiller sur ce qu'ils peuvent réclamer concernant les services d'eau. Le système se présente comme une riche tapisserie où sont entrelacées des revendications historiques et actuelles. La recherche explore les rôles et les relations existant entre les acteurs qui interagissent dans les discours sur les réalités locales. Se fondant sur leur économie politique locale, ceux-ci définissent et actualisent leur droit humain fondamental à une vie décente dans la ville ; ils minimisent la rareté de ces biens et services urbains ou s'y adaptent. La recherche s'appuie sur une méthode mixte avec des recherches ethnographiques et des documents d'archives. Elle montre les caractéristiques uniques de ce système de gouvernance particulier, qui est un modèle dans un espace émergent non-conformiste, où les habitants ont un rôle essentiel dans la gouvernance de leur système d'eau par leur utilisation des normes et des systèmes informelsCities are made up of assemblages of incoherent wholes which co-exist together in a seemingly placid or tolerating mode of existence. Due to their nature and neo-liberalist policies governing them, the urban services are assumed to be provided in the right quantities and the right time for all, which is not always the case as many interests are at play contesting the powers that are. Water – a basic good and right enshrined in many nations’ constitutions is still a far cry for all, is at the crux of this thesis in which a case study of Soweto East – a routinely marginalized heavily contested ‘ghetto’ space in which the residents have suffered historical neglect and injustice in the provision of basic urban goods and services and a site of several failed development interventions which foster urban injustice and further entrench the lack of the right to dwell in the city- has been used to depict the governance of a water system to ensure resilience and sustainability in the wake of the Sustainable Development Goals. Using the Governance Analytical Framework, this thesis unpackages the contested s(p)laces where dwellers have democratically organized themselves to take charge of their destiny by creating systems that utilize both the statutory norms and informal norms in differing measures to ensure that they can lay claim on water services. The system boasts of a rich interwoven tapestry of both historical and current claims for its being. The research explores the different roles and relationships existing between the various actors who move in between discourses of the local realities, relying on their local political economy to define or adapt to the actualization of the basic human right to a descent livelihood in the city and minimize the scarcity of these urban goods and services. Mixed method research infused with ethnography and archival material demonstrated the unique governance features of this particular system which is a model of a non-conformist emergent space where the dwellers are critical in governing their water system using the informal norms and systems
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Soto, Vasquez Adrian Nicolas, Zevallos Diego Martin Chirinos, Rojas Nathaly Gladys Lujan, and Janampa German Salvador Salcedo. "Plataforma digital oficios Perú." Bachelor's thesis, Universidad Peruana de Ciencias Aplicadas (UPC), 2020. http://hdl.handle.net/10757/652761.
Full textAbstract:
Diversos ciudadanos de Lima tienen adversidades en los servicios básicos del hogar. Problemas comunes como el atoro de inodoros, una volada de fusible e inclusive daño que imposibilite realizar su vida de manera cotidiana. Así mismo, hay muchos trabajadores informales que pueden dar solución a estos problemas. Las cuales son personas que viven del día a día, y mientras más trabajo tenga, mejor calidad de vida podría alcanzar.
Por ello, el objetivo de nuestro proyecto es conectar a estos dos segmentos, a través de una plataforma web, donde podrán encontrar personal capacitado para lo que se requiera. Los proveedores del servicio decidirán entre dos tipos de suscripciones mensuales; y por el lado de los clientes, pagarán una tarifa plana para la revisión de sus problemas.
Se tiene la convicción de la viabilidad de este proyecto, basados en los resultados de la investigación de mercado, focus group, entrevistas a expertos y resultados del concierge.Many citizens of Lima have adversities with the home basic services. These can get stuck, spoiled, even completely broken. And, on the other side, many informal workers that can give solutions to these problems. Which are people that lives up to a daily income; as much work they can make, they can achieve a better life quality. For that reason, this project intends to connect these two segments, through a web platform, where they can find the qualified technician it is needed. The providers of this service will choose between two option of subscription; meanwhile, the clients will pay a flat rate for the inspection of their problem. The team has the belief of the viability of this project, based on the results of the market investigation, focus group, interviews to experts and the concierge.
Trabajo de investigación
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RAMOS, MONICA MACHADO NEVES. "BETWEEN THE ISOLATION AND THE INFORMALITY: LIMITS AND CHALLENGES TO THE PRACTICE OF REFLECTION WITHIN TEACHER FORMATION." PONTIFÍCIA UNIVERSIDADE CATÓLICA DO RIO DE JANEIRO, 2015. http://www.maxwell.vrac.puc-rio.br/Busca_etds.php?strSecao=resultado&nrSeq=24561@1.
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PONTIFÍCIA UNIVERSIDADE CATÓLICA DO RIO DE JANEIROCOORDENAÇÃO DE APERFEIÇOAMENTO DO PESSOAL DE ENSINO SUPERIOR
PROGRAMA DE EXCELENCIA ACADEMICA
É recorrente o pensamento de que a escola é, por excelência, o locus de formação docente, e que esta se dá em um processo de reflexão sobre a prática. É neste contexto que vai se constituindo a identidade profissional, sendo o professor o sujeito de sua formação. Pautado nesta ideia, este trabalho busca voltar o olhar para dentro da formação, para perceber como se dá na prática o processo reflexivo. A investigação se deu com profissionais da Rede Municipal de Armação dos Búzios, através de observações das práticas desenvolvidas em duas salas de aula, e dos encontros destinados à formação continuada, oferecidos pela Secretaria Municipal de Educação. Foram entrevistados nove profissionais, sendo seis professoras, um professor formador e duas supervisoras escolares. As observações nas salas de aula se deram em duas diferentes escolas: uma das mais antigas da rede e a outra uma das mais novas. Sem a pretensão de estabelecer a justaposição entre teoria e prática, o trabalho destina-se a perceber em que medida ocorre o diálogo entre a sala de aula e os encontros de formação, identificando o lugar da prática reflexiva no processo de formação docente. O diálogo entre as observações e escutas teve como referencial teórico a interlocução com António Nóvoa, Maurice Tardif, Rui Canário, João Formosinho e Philippe Perrenoud, e com demais autores que se inserem neste campo de atuação. O trabalho aponta para a necessidade de superação da marcante presença da forma escolar nos encontros de formação e nas relações que se processam no interior da escola, onde vem se naturalizando a impossibilidade do professor assumir seu lugar de sujeito e de refletir sobre as práticas que, significativamente, deveriam contribuir para a formação da sua identidade docente.
It is recurrent the thinking that the school is by excellence the locus of teacher formation, and that it occurs within a process of reflection on the practice. It is in this context that the professional identity has been constituted, being the teacher the subject of their own formation. Based upon this idea, this work aims at looking into the formation in order to perceive how the reflective process takes place into practice. The investigation took place with professionals from the Municipal Education System of Armação dos Búzios through observations of the practices carried out in two classrooms, and meetings devoted to the continuous formation offered by the Secretariat of Municipal Education. Nine professionals were interviewed, being six of them teachers, a teacher in charge of formation and two school supervisors. The observations in the classrooms occurred at two different schools: a school considered to be one of the oldest within the Municipal System and the other one regarded as being one of the newest ones. Without the intention of establishing a juxtaposition of theory and practice, the work intends to perceive in which way occurs the dialogue between the classroom time and the meetings of formation, identifying the place of the reflective practice within the teacher formation. The dialogue between the observations and listening had as theoretical basis the interlocution with António Nóvoa, Maurice Tardif, Rui Canário, João Formosinho and Philippe Perrenoud, among other authors whose works are within this scope. The work points to the necessity of the overcoming of the outstanding presence of the school shape in the meetings of formation and in the relations which take place inside the school, where there has been naturalizing the impossibility of the teacher to assume their place as a subject and reflect on the practices that, significantly, should contribute towards the formation of their teacher identity.
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Alvarez, Villa Daphne Verfasser], and Davide [Akademischer Betreuer] [Cantoni. "Informality and social capital in latin America : history and political economy / Daphne Alvarez Villa. Betreuer: Davide Cantoni." München : Universitätsbibliothek der Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, 2015. http://d-nb.info/1079140301/34.
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Alvarez, Villa Daphne [Verfasser], and Davide [Akademischer Betreuer] Cantoni. "Informality and social capital in latin America : history and political economy / Daphne Alvarez Villa. Betreuer: Davide Cantoni." München : Universitätsbibliothek der Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, 2015. http://d-nb.info/1079140301/34.
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