Suchergebnisse

This article reports a wide range of complementary or antinomic insights into the multi‐layered globalizing process, in an attempt to understand its causes and significance. Different perceptions and assessments of its far‐reaching consequences all over the world are picked out. The ambiguity of the high‐technology revolution with potential transition from material to time values is contrasted with the self‐destructive bases of self‐interest policies, and the flagrant defeat of the modern economy among those excluded from planetary society. While on the surface it seems to be only a change of relations between the finance sphere and the "real economy", the more comprehensive and penetrating cognition of recent occurrences reveals a questioning of human values. New forms of social relationships will need to be imagined to define what human worth is.

This paper explores the relationship of the informal economy to the formal economy and to the formal regulatory environment. It begins with a comparison of the earlier concept of the 'informal sector' with the new expanded concept of the 'informal economy' which includes microentrepreneurs, own account operators, informal wage workers, and industrial outworkers. The central arguments of the paper are that (a) most informal enterprises and workers are intrinsically linked to formal firms; (b) different segments of the informal economy are overregulated, de-regulated, or under-regulated; and (c) there are benefits and costs to both formality and informality. The paper concludes that the appropriate role for government is (i) to ensure that the formal regulatory environment is not biased in favour of formal firms and workers over informal enterprises and workers (or vice versa) and (ii) to regulate the commercial and employment relationships between formal firms, informal enterprises, and informal wage workers.

Polanyi analyzes the historical deployment of a "formal" economic science starting from the "market-scarcity-instrumental rationality triptych." This triptych, and the knowledge associated with it, is shown to be more than merely a "substantial" economic science's interest in the triptych "need-nature-institution." While we must agree with Polanyi that economism is ill-suited to the first triptych, we hesitate to accept his suggested alternative, a heterogeneous mixture of naturalism and institutionalism, essentialism and historicism.

The text of the proposed Recommendation concerning the transition from the informal to the formal economy is based on the Conclusions adopted by the International Labour Conference following its first discussion of the item at its 103rd Session, in May-June 2014 (the ""Conclusions""). It also takes into account the replies received to the questionnaire contained in the preliminary report