This paper evaluates critically the meta-narrative that capitalism is becoming more powerful, expansive, hegemonic and totalising as it stretches its tentacles ever wider across the globe and penetrates deeper into each and every corner of daily life. Reviewing the ways in which an emerging...

Over the past decade or so, there has been widespread recognition that a large and growing proportion of the global workforce is employed in informal sector enterprises. To explain this, neo-liberals contend that enterprises operate in the informal sector due to high taxes, public sector...

This article provides a critical evaluation of the competing discourses that variously represent the informal economy as a residue or leftover of some pre-capitalist era, a by-product of a new type of emergent formal economy, an alternative mode of work organization or a complement to the formal...

Purpose – Since the turn of the millennium, a small corpus of post-structuralist thought has emerged that challenges the dominant belief that capitalism is now hegemonic and that all economic formations are contrasting varieties of capitalism. This paper contributes to the development of this...

To evaluate the size of the underground sector, numerous measurement methods have been employed ranging from indirect to direct survey approaches. Evaluating critically the range of techniques available, this paper firstly highlights the growing appreciation that direct rather than indirect...

This paper evaluates critically the argument of neo-liberals that informal employment is a result of high taxes, public sector corruption and too much state interference in the free market and that the consequent solution is to reduce taxes, public sector corruption and the regulatory burden via...

This paper discusses the various dimensions of Central Eastern Europe closure with the communist past, and then assesses the impact of transitional justice measures in the closure with communism. Special attention is paid to the so called “lustration”, which in the view of the author...

Given that 60 per cent of the global workforce is in the informal sector, this article develops a typology that classifies economies according to, firstly, where different countries sit on a continuum of informalization and, secondly, the character of their informal sectors. This is then applied...

Over the past decade or so, two competing theoretical perspectives have arisen that explain participation in informal entrepreneurship as resulting from either too little or too much state intervention. To evaluate these competing explanations critically, the authors report on a 2012 UK survey...

To evaluate critically the policy options available for tackling the undeclared economy, this paper commences by evaluating the implications of four hypothetical policy choices, namely doing nothing, de-regulating the declared economy, eradicating the undeclared economy, or moving undeclared...