Abstract
One of the most important recent discoveries in the field of economic sociology concerns the close-to-universal extent and the explanatory significance of the informal sector. This article will discuss some of its most fundamental characteristics under capitalism and state socialism. The informal sector is defined as all productive and distributive income earning activities which take place outside the scope of public regulation on the macrosocietal level. Although the concept of the informal sector was originally coined with reference to urban economies in the Third World, its scope extends far beyond the poorest countries: the informal sector produces a respectable share of the gross domestic product (GDP) in such advanced countries as the United States, Italy, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, or Spain. Furthermore, and perhaps more surprisingly for outside observers, informality is so widely pre? sent under existing forms of state socialism that any inquiry into the actual economic, social, political, and even cultural processes of the supposedly "centrally planned economies" is bound to be misspecified unless it takes into consideration the socialist informal sector.