If you destroy a free market you create a black market.
Economics taught in most of the elite universities are practically useless in my context. My country is dominated by drug economy and a mafia. Textbook economics does not work in my context, and I have very few recommendations from anybody as to how to put together a legal economy.
The underground economy is not all smugglers. It is hundreds of thousands of otherwise honest people who have withdrawn their consent to be governed.
The rapid growth in many of our suburbs has spawned a booming construction industry eager to hire low wage immigrants who gladly fill these jobs, many of them happy to be paid in cash, free of federal and state taxes.
My understanding is that a book becomes a best seller only when it is pirated, sold on footpaths and at traffic lights.
Gramacho is the last landfill that allows people in. Brazil is the leading nation in recycling due to its poverty. There are people there surviving from what they find in the garbage.
There's no unemployment in squatter cities. Everyone works. One-sixth of humanity is there. It's soon going to be more than that.
I was selling stuff probably since I could remember, like 6 or 7 years old. I was always out there helping my mom and dad sell watches, glasses, CDs, DVDs, stuff like that. Whatever we could put our hands on. I did it until I was around 17. But I was just doing it because I had to. There was no other option.
So from a long time ago, every year 700,000 Mexicans have only three routes to take: migration, the informal economy and the path to antisocial behavior.
Nearly one billion women and men, a third of the world's workforce, are either unemployed or unable to earn enough to keep themselves out of extreme poverty. There are 100 million new entrants into the labour market each year. Up to 90 percent in some regions are in the informal economy. 180 million kids are engaged in the worst forms of child labour. Put it all together and it is not only morally unacceptable, but politically dangerous
You either make it illegal, in which case you support a huge underground economy or you tax it within the limits people can afford.
Economics taught in most of the elite universities are practically useless in my context. My country [Afghanistan] is dominated by drug economy and a mafia; textbook economics does not work in my context.
One of the remarkable things about slums is that they do develop their own social organization and economy and even culture that is, on some level, functional and in some cases, remarkably resilient. This is kind of amazing.
I would like to make sure, first of all, that our women in the informal sector - I mean, these are the farmers and the traders; many of them are not educated, many of them lacking literacy - be able to give them better working conditions. And we've done a lot to be able to achieve that.
Sometimes our definitions fall short. Take, for example, the way we view income and labor. It simply doesn't cover enough of the work that women, and in particular poor women, are doing - especially in their own households and the vast 'informal' economy in which most of the world's poorest people work.
I've sold my records outta shopping carts on the street.
When coming in to land at Santiago, Chile, I saw the area between the city and the Andes mountains was smoking with rubbish dumps. While exploring the dumps, I made friends with people living and working there and saw how they survived through recycling the rubbish.
Tourism provides employment to the poorest of the poor. Gram seller earns something, auto-rickshaw driver earns something, pakoda seller earns something, and tea seller also earns something.
Lagos is sometimes emblematic of disorder. In traffic, drivers make their own rules. There is a constant war between our street hawkers and our various forms of law enforcement deployed to eradicate the 'indiscipline' of poverty.
The idea that the Third World lacks the spirit of enterprise is laughable. Peasant farmers who switch to another crop in response to a change in their government's marketing arrangements are entrepreneurs. So are the unregistered taxi and minibus operators who keep most Third World cities moving. So are street vendors, perambulating water vendors, money changers, and informal credit brokers. So are the growers of illegal crops such as coca, who in many countries are denied the opportunity of making a decent living by legal means. So are the smugglers of just about anything that do such a roaring trade across Africa's borders, profiting from the massive price distortions that government policies create.
Because people along the route had realized that there was demand and quickly organized supply. That's so Chinese. In a well-organized country like Germany, such a problem may not have arisen in the first place, but in China people immediately recognized an opportunity.
I'm indeed a mandasi seller, and I'm proud of it, because the majority of women in Malawi are like us, mandasi sellers.
Sometimes the proprietors of the little juke joints gave me a couple dollars. I loved that. I'd go back next Saturday.
Contrary to economists' beliefs, the informal sectors of the world's economies, in total, are predominant, and the institutionalized, monetized sectors grow out of them and rest upon them, rather than the reverse.
Africa's informal economy is one of the most innovative and inventive environments in the world. Yet it is an environment with little regulation in which workers are often exposed to hard conditions and live without a safety net.
