Revisiting the Informal Sector A General Equilibrium Approach
The last 50 years have seen unprecedented population growth and urbanization, particularly in developing countries. However, economic development in these countries has failed to generate adequate employment and income opportunities in the modern sector.
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Revisiting the Informal Sector A General Equilibrium Approach
Revisiting the Informal Sector
Sarbajit Chaudhuri . Ujjaini Mukhopadhyay
Revisiting the Informal Sector A General Equilibrium Approach
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Sarbajit Chaudhuri Department of Economics University of Calcutta 56A B.T. Road Kolkata-700050 India [email protected]
Ujjaini Mukhopadhyay Department of Economics Behala College Kolkata-700060 India [email protected]
ISBN 978-1-4419-1193-3 e-ISBN 978-1-4419-1194-0 DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-1194-0 Springer New York Dordrecht Heidelberg London Library of Congress Control Number: 2009935568 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2010 All rights reserved. This work may not be translated or copied in whole or in part without the written permission of the publisher (Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, 233 Spring Street, New York, NY 10013, USA), except for brief excerpts in connection with reviews or scholarly analysis. Use in connection with any form of information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed is forbidden. The use in this publication of trade names, trademarks, service marks, and similar terms, even if they are not identified as such, is not to be taken as an expression of opinion as to whether or not they are subject to proprietary rights. Printed on acid-free paper Springer is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com)
To Bela Chaudhuri and Professor Sambhunath Chaudhuri and Sibani Mukhopadhyay and Anil Mukhopadhyay
Foreword
Informal sector has emerged as a critical element in the development process of the entire developing world. It is now well recognised that such a sector provides employment to the majority of the workforce in the poor countries. Sometimes the share of employment in these activities goes way beyond 50% of total employment. Informal usually refers to extra-legal and non-recorded economic activities and can capture a whole array of diverse occupations, products and services. Development Economics as a discipline has not treated such topics with adequate reverence. Text books dealing with economic development do not have exclusive sections devoted to the discussion of growth, dynamics and sustenance of informal activities. In particular how informal transactions influence employment, output, productivity, wages and environment is seldom discussed formally in terms of analytical models. Informal sector does not operate in a vacuum. Thus the general equilibrium linkages involving the informal and formal activities also need to be explored in detail if development policies are to be properly evaluated. This volume successfully addresses both these issues and does it with competence and rigour. Authors of this volume have been working on the frontiers of development policy research in the context of open developing economies, focusing mainly on general equilibrium implications of such policies. In fact one of the authors has written at length on informal cred
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