The Petty Street Vendors and Their Livelihoods of the Kathmandu Valley Cities, Nepal
Street vendors are defined as informal traders who sell their goods or services whether or not it has fixed location for conducting business. They are generally found in most of the cities of poor developing countries. In the Kathmandu valley cities of Ne
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The Petty Street Vendors and Their Livelihoods of the Kathmandu Valley Cities, Nepal Puspa Sharma and Pushkar K. Pradhan
Abstract Street vendors are defined as informal traders who sell their goods or services whether or not it has fixed location for conducting business. They are generally found in most of the cities of poor developing countries. In the Kathmandu valley cities of Nepal, the petty street traders consist of features such as temporary structure, small size, self-employment, low investment, low skills and marginal groups. They are also known as ‘invisible economy’ and contribute largely to the national economy indirectly. The data for this paper were acquired from standard observation protocol sheet, GPS, informal discussions with the vendors based on checklist and available existing documents. This paper explores that ‘convenient’ is one of the most crucial factors to determine the variation in the spatial location pattern of the petty street vendors in the Kathmandu valley cities. GIS and the nearest neighborhood technique were used to identify the spatial pattern of the petty street vendors. The paper also briefly describes the historical account of the evolution of informal marketing activities in the Kathmandu valley cities. It is found that the petty vendors are mostly migrants with petty trading as their only income source, and they are moving on through hardship life.
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Introduction
Informal sector is indeed emerged as a crucial subject as well as an important economic sector for the cities of poor developing countries due to features such as ease of entry, little investment and low skill. Available literature on urban-based development theories indicates that the developing countries’ cities offer undoubtedly the most potential places for investment in development activities, thus the opportunities for employment (Lewis 1954; Fei and Ranis 1961; Todaro 1976). P. Sharma P.K. Pradhan (&) Central Department of Geography, Tribhuvan University, Kathmandu, Nepal e-mail: [email protected] P. Sharma e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2017 A. Li et al. (eds.), Land Cover Change and Its Eco-environmental Responses in Nepal, Springer Geography, DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-2890-8_16
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These attributes of the cities attract huge numbers of people from across different parts of the country. But the stream flows of the labor force are so large that the relative capacity of the cities is weak to fully absorb the labor force, creating a huge surplus of labor force together with the problems of unemployment. As a result, jobs are very competitive and finding jobs in the formal sector such as industries and public service is very difficult. The informal sector on the other hand is only an option for employment and income generation for such people who are seeking jobs in the cities. According to the dualism model (Lewis 1954; Fei and Ranis 1961), the informal also called as subsistence and traditional sector including petty retail trading in
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