Illicit work, social security fraud, illegal employment, economic crime and other examples of shadow economy activities are becoming an ever increasing problem in countries around the world. Most governments try to reduce the shadow economy through punitive measures or through education, rather than through reforms of the tax and social security systems. Friedrich Schneider and Dominik H. Enste suggest a reform of state (public) institutions, which could improve the dynamics of the official economy.

Report assessing society's ability to sustain itself without hurting the next generation

Product Description: Informal economic activity, defined as exchanges made by individuals and organizations in extra-legal or non-bureaucratic contexts, represents a significant and growing share of global economic activity. The informal economy brings to mind images of street vendors in markets and bazaars throughout the developing world; indeed, informal economic activity ranges from 25-75% of economic activity, depending on the country under study...read more

Product Description: What is poverty and how can it be tackled? Taking the Third Way out of its narrow party political context, this book argues that it is necessary to harness work beyond employment in order to pave a Third Way beyond capitalism and socialism...read more

Product Description: This book provides insight into the diverse aspects of the informal sector, its role in the context of unemployment, child labor, globalization and environment, as well as its multi-faceted interaction with the other sectors of the economy.

"[A] fascinating X-ray of the city...Venkatesh's engrossing narrative dissects the intricacies of illegal commerce." --Publishers Weekly (STARRED review)New York is a city of highs and lows, where wealthy elites share the streets with desperate immigrants and destitute locals. Bridging this economic divide is New York’s underground economy, the invisible network of illicit transactions between rich and poor that secretly weaves together the whole city.Sudhir Venkatesh, acclaimed sociologist at Columbia University and author of Gang Leader for a Day, returns to the streets to connect the dots of New York’s divergent economic worlds and crack the code of the city’s underground economy. Based on Venkatesh’s interviews with prostitutes and socialites, immigrants and academics, high end drug bosses and street-level dealers, Floating City exposes the underground as the city’s true engine of social transformation and economic prosperity—revealing a wholly unprecedented vision of New York.A memoir of sociological investigation, Floating City draws from Venkatesh’s decade of research within the affluent communities of Upper East Side socialites and Midtown businessmen, the drug gangs of Harlem and the sex workers of Brooklyn, the artists of Tribeca and the escort services of Hell’s Kitchen. Venkatesh arrived in the city after his groundbreaking research in Chicago, where crime remained stubbornly local: gangs stuck to their housing projects and criminals stayed on their corners. But in Floating City, Venkatesh discovers that New York’s underground economy unites instead of divides inhabitants: a vast network of “off the books” transactions linking the high and low worlds of the city. Venkatesh shows how dealing in drugs and sex and undocumented labor bridges the conventional divides between rich and poor, unmasking a city knit together by the invisible threads of the underground economy.Planting himself squarely within this unexplored world, Venkatesh closely follows a dozen New Yorkers locked in the underground economy. Bangledeshi shop clerks like Manjun and Santosh navigate immense networks of illegal goods and services, connecting inquisitive tourists with sex workers and drug dealers. Hispanic prostitutes like Angela and Carla feel secure enough in the new city to leave their old neighborhoods behind in pursuit of bigger money, yet abandon all the safety they had when their clients were known locals. Rich uptown women like Analise and Brittany have the changing city at their beck and call, but both turn to sex work as an easy way to make ends meet without relying on their family fortunes. Venkatesh’s greatest guide is Shine, an African American drug boss based in Harlem who hopes to break into the elusive, upscale cocaine market. Without connections among wealthy whites, Shine undertakes an audacious campaign of self-reinvention, leaving behind the certainties of race and class with all the drive of the greatest entrepreneurs. As Shine explains to Venkatesh, “This is New York! We’re like hummingbirds, man. We go flower to flower. . . . Here, you need to float.”Floating City: A Rogue Sociologist Lost and Found in New York’s Underground Economy chronicles Venkatesh’s decade of discovery and loss in the shifting terrain of New York, where research subjects might disappear suddenly and new allies emerge by chance, where close friends might reveal themselves to be criminals of the lowest order. Propelled by Venkatesh’s numerous interviews and firsthand research, Floating City at its heart is a story of one man struggling to understand a complex global city constantly in the throes of becoming.Booklist"Venkatesh brings to life the underground economy of New York, where rich and poor and varying ethnicities and backgrounds meet and function while they “float.” An enlightening book."Kirkus"Displays a piercing sense of empathy and ability to translate dry sociological principles into an understanding of the difficult lives of the urban poor... Venkatesh has established a singular voice in urban sociology, and his immersive research and insights remain penetrating and unique." 

Product Description: On one hand, marginals are complex organizational systems. On the other hand, they are an example of elegant, applied organizational operations. In The Marginal Organization, Tafoya focuses on organizations often described as part of an informal economy, informal sector, underground economy, or unofficial economy...read more

Product Description: Although entrepreneurship in the informal economy occurs outside state regulatory systems, informal commercial activities account for an estimated 30% of economic activity around the world. Informal entrepreneurship goes unmonitored despite the fact that it significantly contributes to poverty reduction and economic development...read more

Thousands of Africans head to China each year to buy cell phones, auto parts, and other products that they will import to their home countries through a clandestine global back channel.Hundreds of Paraguayan merchants smuggle computers, electronics, and clothing across the border to Brazil. Scores of laid-off San Franciscans, working without any licenses, use Twitter to sell home-cooked foods. Dozens of major multinationals sell products through unregistered kiosks and street vendors around the world. When we think of the informal economy, we tend to think of crime: prostitution, gun running, drug trafficking. Stealth of Nations opens up this underground realm, showing how the worldwide informal economy deals mostly in legal products and is, in fact, a ten-trillion-dollar industry, making it the second-largest economy in the world, after that of the United States.Having penetrated this closed world and persuaded its inhabitants to open up to him, Robert Neuwirth makes clear that this informal method of transaction dates back as far as humans have existed and traded, that it provides essential services and crucial employment that fill the gaps in formal systems, and that this unregulated market works smoothly and effectively, with its own codes and unwritten rules.Combining a vivid travelogue with a firm grasp on global economic strategy-along with a healthy dose of irreverence and skepticism toward conventional perceptions-Neuwirth gives us an eye-opening account of a world that is always operating around us, hidden in plain sight.

Product Description: Thousands of Africans head to China each year to buy cell phones, auto parts, and other products that they will import to their home countries through a clandestine global back channel.Hundreds of Paraguayan merchants smuggle computers, electronics, and clothing across the border to Brazil...read more

Product Description: Portraying how entrepreneurs often start out conducting some or all of their trade on an 'off-the-books' basis and how many continue to do so once they become established, this book provides the first detailed account of the vast and ubiquitous hidden enterprise culture existing in the interstices of western economies...read more

The introduction of the concepts of continuous-time optimization and stochastic process that have enabled financial economists to integrate both dynamics and uncertainty into the study of optimal intertemporal allocations of resources, portfolio selection, and the dynamic behaviour of security prices represents one of the great advances in economic theory of this generation. The ramifications of these concepts have been felt not only in the realm of academic economics but in the practice of investment banking, money management, and arbitrage trading. Economic theorists and finance practitioners alike turn to the work of Robert C. Merton as the seedbed for the theory of continuous-time finance theory. In this book, Merton provides an overview and synthesis of finance theory from the perspective of continuous-time analysis that covers individual financial choice, corporate finance, financial intermediation, capital markets, and selected topics on the interface between private and public finance. The volume is built around Merton's most prominent papers, which he has brought up to date with postscripts, and newly written chapters on recent developments in portfolio theory, option and other derivative security pricing, financial intermediation, capital asset pricing, and general equilibrium analysis. Paul Samuelson. (view table of contents)

Corridor of Hope describes and analyzes diverse forms of informal economic activities in the Western and Eastern Hemisphere with an emphasis on grassroots initiatives, governmental control, and regulation. Abol Hassan Danesh unearths the intricacies of many of the activities loosely defined as informal economy. He transcends the spatial and temporal aspects of informal economic enterprise to universalize the application of theory and methodological pedagogy of informal economy. His thirty-one sections on the informal economy create a viable alternative to formal economic institution, while emphasizing the spontaneity and formlessness of the informal economy. An understanding of informal economy as presented by the author will lead to a reevaluation of the unquestioned acceptance of the formal economy. (view table of contents)

Product Description: Drawing on the experiences of a population of women informal sector traders in Harare, Zimbabwe, the report documents patterns of differentiation within the sector amidst the generalised decline in working and living conditions associated with the structural adjustment programme...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: As economic crises struck the Third World in the 1970s and 1980s, large segments of the population turned to the informal economy to survive. Though this phenomenon has previously been analyzed from a strictly economic point of view, this book looks at street vending in the largest city in the world, Mexico City, as a political process...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: In the aspiring global cities of Ciudad Juarez and El Paso, people generate income and develop their housing informally on both sides of the US-Mexico border. This book analyzes women and men in low-and middle-income neighborhoods in the core and in the old and new peripheries of two cities that straddle an international border...read more

(view table of contents)

Product Description: In the aspiring global cities of Ciudad Juarez and El Paso, people generate income and develop their housing informally on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. Staudt analyzes women and men in low- and middle-income neighborhoods in the core an in the old and new peripheries of two cities that straddle an international border...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Report assessing society's ability to sustain itself without hurting the next generation (view table of contents)