Informal Work in Developed Nations, a collection edited by Enrico Marcelli, Colin Williams, and Pascale Joassart. The price at Amazon is a hefty $115.87, so I’ll be looking out for it at my university library rather than buying it. Looks like a nice companion to Off the Books.
The blurb:
Almost everyone residing in a developed nation knows someone who has engaged in paid work that is licit but not reported to the government (e.g., babysitting, gardening, construction, financial consulting). But while most acknowledge that such work is helpful to the individuals involved, and that informal work may enhance a sense of community, most scholars view it as a pre-modern form of exchange and something that disappears as capitalist markets expand globally. Both mainstream and heterodox economics typically assume that there is an inevitable shift towards the formalization of goods and services provisioning as societies become more “advanced” or “developed” (the “formalization thesis”). In these views, the existence of informal activities is a manifestation of backwardness and it is assumed that they will disappear as an economy becomes more “modern.”
This book challenges these conventional theses about the linear trajectory of informal work and economic development by arguing that informal work is not trivial for understanding modern capitalist economies, and that both mainstream and heterodox theories about the economy must be altered to address the role of informal work in relatively developed economies.
Table of Contents:
Introduction to an Institutional Economic Approach to informal Work in Developed Nations Enrico A. Marcelli, Colin C. Williams and Pascale M. Joassart
Part I: Historical and Methodological Foundations
2. The Changing Conceptualization of Informal Work in Developed Economies Colin C. Williams
3. Measuring Informal Work in Developed Nations Pascale M. Joassart
Part II: Informal Work in Europe
4. Informal Work in the Diverse Economies of ‘Post-Socialist’ Europe Adrian Smith
5. Informal Employment in the Work-Welfare Arrangement of Germany Birgit Pfau-Effinger and Slaydana Sacac-Magdalenic
6. Gender and Informal Work Jan Windebank and Colin C. Williams
7. Geographical Variations in Informal Work in Contemporary England Colin C. Williams
8. The Fallacy of the Formal and Informal Divide: Lessons from a Post-Fordist Regional Economy Simone Ghezzi
Part III: Informal Work in North America
9. Day Laborers in New York’s Informal Economy Edwin Melendez, Nik Theodore and Abel Valenzuela, Jr.
10. Effects of Wage and Hour Law Enforcement on Informal Work Jordon Rickles and Paul M. Ong
11. Informal Work among Mexican Immigrants in Metropolitan Los Angeles Enrico A. Marcelli
12. Informal Work in Rural America: Theory and Evidence Tim Slack and Leif Jensen
13. Informal Work in Canada Bernard Fortin and Guy Lacroix
14. Conclusion Colin C. Williams and Enrico A. Marcelli
Brad Taylor is a graduate student in Political Science at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. He blogs at 
I will have to check it out. Looks to be an effective explanation of grey-market tendencies between industrial superpowers and underdeveloped countries.
Perhaps it needs to be pirated? ;D
I offer four quatloos for the effort to pirate this book.
*Confers 1 googleplex of Internets upon the geeky Jim*
Informal work (naturally counter-economic trade) persists because it serves an important purpose, clearly.
Brad, is this being used a text anywhere??