The informal economy
Economic informality in Pacific island countries
Anyone who has travelled to Southeast Asia knows that cities such as Jakarta and Bangkok display a rich variety of ‘informal’ economic activities.
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The informal economy
Arthur Lewis at Pasar Skouw: re-reading ‘The Theory of Economic Growth’
John Conroy’s re-reading of Sir Arthur Lewis’ (Nobel Prize for Economics in 1979) 1955 book “The Theory of Economic Growth” provides new insights into a puzzle found at Pasar Skouw, a marketplace ...
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The informal economy
Cross border trade: Indonesia and PNG. 2020
Informal cross-border trade (ICBT) between sovereign states may be illegal, but it is not necessarily antisocial.
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The informal economy
Submarines and Survivors: Issues in the taxation of informal enterprises, 2015
Enterprises in the informal economy in PNG can be classed as either Submarines or Survivors. ‘Submarines’ should probably be paying tax, but have the ability to submerge when they want to escape t ...
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The informal economy
Planning for a more productive informal economy in PNG, 2012
Sadly, it’s a waste of time worrying about the shortage of ‘jobs’ in PNG because the modern economy will lag behind for many years in creating formal employment for its rapidly growing population.
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The informal economy
Informality in the World Development Report 2013
The World Development Report 2013 discussed the subject of ‘Jobs’. The World Bank has decided to embrace the idea of economic informality, deciding that ‘ informal is normal’ and may even be ‘tran ...
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The informal economy
Papua New Guinea: the informal economy and the resource boom, 2011
Towards the end of 2010, the PNG government approved a National Informal Economy Policy. This was necessary because of concern that the benefits of increasing economic activity in the resource-ext ...
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The informal economy
Papua New Guinea: policy for the informal economy, 2011
Why should PNG encourage the growth of its informal economy when most governments are trying to reduce the size of their ‘informal’ sectors? In PNG, however, the informal economy is too small, not ...
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The informal economy
When Monsoon Asia met Melanesia (and Dutch Hollandia became Asian Jayapura), 2013
In just 10 years, from 1963 to 1973, the sleepy Dutch/Melanesian town of Hollandia became a busy Asian town called Jayapura. Almost overnight a thriving informal economy emerged, where none had ex ...
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The informal economy
Economic informality: the case of North Korea, 2013
In recent years numerous observers of North Korea have drawn attention to the emergence of an informal economy in the DPRK, and have offered explanations based on circumstances specific to that co ...
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The informal economy
Are you being served? The role of the service sector in development 2013
The idea that services become more important as economies develop, while first agriculture and then manufacturing diminish in relative terms, dates back to the seventeenth century.
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The informal economy
A national policy for the informal economy in Papua New Guinea, 2010
PNG adopted a national policy designed to support a thriving informal economy in 2010. This document sets out the rationale for the policy and explains the measures which need to be taken to encou ...
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The informal economy
A tough nut to crack: legislating for Papua New Guinea’s informal economy, 2015
Plans to create an ‘Informal Economy’ branch within PNG’s Ministry for Community Development suggest that the Government’s official policy to facilitate the informal economy may begin to gain some ...
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The informal economy
Papua New Guinea’s informal economy needs support, 2015
Changes of Minister and in the senior bureaucracy have contributed to stasis in action on PNG’s national informal economy policy.
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The informal economy
The eclipse of PNG’s Eight Aims and the false dawn of informality
This vignette from PNG’s largely unwritten economic history tells how in 1973 the informal economy came to be, briefly and unsuccessfully, at the centre of nationalist aspirations for the reductio ...
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The informal economy
Longer papers on the informal economy by John Conroy
These are more formal papers and include discussions of the origins of the idea in Dickensian London and 1960s Ghana, its application in Papua New Guinea, and what a rural informal economy looks l ...
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