Abstract
This essay traces the intellectual history of the concepts ‘informal’ sector and ‘informal economy’ from Karl Marx to Arthur Lewis, Barry Bluestone, Keith Hart and S. V. Sethuraman. (This article is based upon a lecture given to first-year MA students in the Centre for Informal Sector and Labour Studies Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.) It shows how the Marxian dynamics of ‘relative surplus population’ has been replaced by the concept of ‘informal economy’. It also discusses the dynamic role of population pressure on agriculture in many countries of the Global South. Finally, it is suggested that the strategies advocated by the International Labour Organization (ILO) since the 1970s have tended to narrow the areas of investigation promoted by them.
Originally published in Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 6 No. 3 Copyright 2017 © Centre for Agrarian Research and Education for South (CARES), New Delhi. All rights reserved. Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holders and the publishers, SAGE Publications India Pvt. Ltd, New Delhi.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
These five phenomena are similarly linked in India today, but the literature is scattered. Two papers which cover much of the ground are Papola (2013) and Gill (2012). The Institute for Human Development (2014) provides relevant data together with an overview of recent developments in the Indian labour market.
- 3.
For those not familiar with this terminology, constant capital is defined as depreciation on fixed assets plus the value of materials used up. Variable capital is the value of labour power. For these definitions, given with numerical examples, see Marx (1959), Chapter 9, Section 2, p. 221.
- 4.
On this, see Marx (1959), Chapter 24, Section 2, p. 623.
- 5.
The accounts of what happens to agricultural and unorganized sector workers are in Marx (1959), Chapter 25, Section 4, pp. 642 and 643, respectively.
- 6.
The quoted passages are from Marx (1959), Chapter 25, Section 2.
- 7.
This end result is described in Marx (1959), Chapter 25, Section 2.
- 8.
On this, see Patnaik (2011), Chapter 1, especially pp. 1–7, inclusive.
- 9.
A list, and the gist of some of their contributions, is given in Bhalla (2009), p. 4, para. 2.3 and the footnotes.
- 10.
See Dasgupta (1974), especially Chapter 2, entitled ‘Dualism and Surplus Labour’.
- 11.
The analysis that led Kuznets to this conclusion is found in Kuznets (1965), Chapter 9, entitled ‘Economic Growth and Income Inequality’.
- 12.
This is, or was, the approach of those who derived sector-wise unorganized sector employment estimates for India, by subtracting the organized sector estimates published by the Ministry of Labour’s Directorate General of Employment and Training (DGE&T), from the NSS Usual Principle and Subsidiary Status (UPSS) employment estimates. In recent years, unit level data from the NSS has made more accurate and more elaborate cross classifications possible. See, for example, the five tables on p. 56 of the Institute for Human Development (2014).
- 13.
The studies were published mainly in the mid-1970s. For a list, see Sethuraman (1976), footnote 1, p. 75.
References
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Bhalla, S. (2021). From ‘Relative Surplus Population’ and ‘Dual Labour Markets’ to ‘Informal’ and ‘Formal’ Employment and Enterprises: Insights About Causation and Consequences. In: Jha, P., Chambati, W., Ossome, L. (eds) Labour Questions in the Global South. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-4635-2_6
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