Journal ArticleDOI
Informal Income Opportunities and Urban Employment in Ghana
TLDR
In this article, the authors studied the economic activities of the low-income section of the labour force in Accra, the urban sub-proletariat into which the unskilled and illiterate majority of Frafra migrants are drawn.Abstract:
This article originated in the study of one Northern Ghanaian group, the Frafras, as migrants to the urban areas of Southern Ghana. It describes the economic activities of the low-income section of the labour force in Accra, the urban sub-proletariat into which the unskilled and illiterate majority of Frafra migrants are drawn.Price inflation, inadequate wages, and an increasing surplus to the requirements of the urban labour market have led to a high degree of informality in the income-generating activities of the sub-proletariat. Consequently income and expenditure patterns are more complex than is normally allowed for in the economic analysis of poor countries. Government planning and the effective application of economic theory in this sphere has been impeded by the unthinking transfer of western categories to the economic and social structures of African cities. The question to be answered is this: Does the ‘reserve army of urban unemployed and underemployed’ really constitute a passive, exploited majority in cities like Accra, or do their informal economic activities possess some autonomous capacity for generating growth in the incomes of the urban (and rural) poor?read more
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Journal ArticleDOI
Urban Informality: Toward an Epistemology of Planning
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors focus on urban informality to highlight the challenges of dealing with the "unplannable" exceptions to the order of formal urbanization and argue that planners must learn to work with this state of exception.
Journal ArticleDOI
Slumdog Cities: Rethinking Subaltern Urbanism
TL;DR: The article is concerned with a formation of ideas - "subaltern urbanism" - which undertakes the theorization of the megacity and its subaltern spaces and subaltern classes, and highlights emergent analytical strategies that transcend the familiar metonyms of underdevelopment.
Posted Content
Informal Sector in Developed and less Developed Countries: A Literature Survey
TL;DR: The authors provide a general overview of contributions to the literature on the informal sector, with a special focus on the PublicChoice approach, and compare these contributions across two institutionallydifferent types of countries: developed and less developed (developing and transition)countries.
Journal ArticleDOI
The informal sector in developed and less developed countries: A literature survey *
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors provide an overview of the contributions to the literature on the informal sector with a special focus on the public choice approach and compare these contributions across two institutionsally different types of countries: developed and less developed (developing and transition) countries.
Journal ArticleDOI
Informal sector or petty commodity production: Dualism or dependence in urban development?
TL;DR: In this article, a critical review of the informal sector debate in recent studies of Third World poverty and employment is presented, based on petty commodity production and its subordinate relationship to the capitalist sector.
References
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Book
London Labour and the London Poor
TL;DR: The London Labour and the London Poor as mentioned in this paper is an extraordinary work of investigative journalism, a work of literature, and a groundbreaking work of sociology, which revealed that the 'two nations' of rich and poor in Victorian Britain were much closer than many people thought.
Book
The Professional Thief
TL;DR: The Professional Thief as discussed by the authors is a monograph by a professional thief with the aid of Edwin H. Sutherland's expert comments and analyses that goes far to explain the genesis, development, and patterns of criminal behavior.