Second Best? Trends and Linkages in the Informal Economy in South Africa
By R. Devey, C. Skinner, I. Valodia. 2006
111 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The idea of a ‘second economy’ has become a feature of recent government economic policy. In this paper we focus on one important element of the second economy – the informal economy. We analyse the nature of the informal economy in South Africa, providing some descriptive statistics and analysis to highlight the nature and extent of the informal economy. Given the present prominence of the ‘second economy’ concept, we provide some analysis of the efficacy of current government support measures to the informal economy, concluding that these are few and far between, patchy and incoherent, and largely ineffective. We then examine linkages between employment in the formal and the informal economy arguing that, contrary to the views of the President and the ANC, there are in fact fairly close linkages between the formal economy and the informal economy. Finally, by way of conclusion, we use the evidence provided in the paper to comment on the accuracy and relevance of the ‘second economy’ concept.
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Law
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5212c5941a9910669b90dbcca14ef99584456f02
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Citations in the corpus
- Urban food insecurity in Cape Town, South Africa: An alternative approach to food access (2011, background): “This second economy was further portrayed as contributing little to GDP (Mbeki, 2003, in Devey et al., 2006:1).”
- Rural Livelihoods in South Africa: Complexity, Vulnerability and Differentiation (2013, unknown): “Informal economic activity in South Africa is typically tightly intertwined with the formal sector, in terms of linkages of capital, inputs, production and employment – churning employment between the formal and informal sectors is commonplace (Devey et al. 2006).”