Informal Economy Quotes

Much of the criticism of economic globalization has centered on factory labor abuses. But the majority of the world's poor are not employed in factories; they are self-employed - as peasant farmers, rural peddlers, urban hawkers, and small producers, usually involved in agriculture and small trade in the world's vast "informal" economy . ~ David Bornstein

Sometimes our definitions fall short. Take, for example, the way we view income and labor. It simply doesn't cover enough of the work that women, and in particular poor women, are doing - especially in their own households and the vast 'informal' economy in which most of the world's poorest people work. ~ Sri Mulyani Indrawati

Unfortunately, the critics of economics have had a tendency to discuss the whole structure as a tissue of misconceptions. It is a critique that fails. The strength of economics is its considerable, if far from complete, understanding of the flows and comparative advantages that underlie trade, jobs, capital and incomes, and the logic of optimising behaviour, all backed by glittering accomplishment in mathematics. That makes it a powerful analytical instrument, so that just a few misconceptions – such as a failure to understand the informal economy or resource depletion – have leverage: like a baby monkey at the controls of a Ferrari, they can turn it into an instrument with extraordinarily destructive potential. If it were a tissue of errors, it would not be dangerous: it is its 90 percent brilliance which makes it so. ~ David Fleming

Family members provided a variety of support--physical, economic, emotional, and psychological... Parents opened bank accounts for their children, even those who were adult, away from home, married, and employed. And children who left Richmond to search for work elsewhere provided for the money in their savings accounts to be used by other relatives, if needed, during their absence. In all these ways African American women and men testified to the notion of family members as having a mutual and continuing responsibility to help each other and to prepare for hard times. ~ Elsa Barkley Brown

So from a long time ago, every year 700,000 Mexicans have only three routes to take: migration, the informal economy and the path to antisocial behavior. ~ Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador

Africa's informal economy is one of the most innovative and inventive environments in the world. Yet it is an environment with little regulation in which workers are often exposed to hard conditions and live without a safety net. ~ Richard Attias

For centuries, the Yangtze River - the longest in Asia - has played an important role in China's history, culture, and economy. The Yangtze is as quintessentially Chinese as the Nile is Egyptian or the Rhine is German. Many businesses use its name. ~ Rebecca MacKinnon

We do not live in an economy, we live in a Ponzi scheme. ~ Douglas Rushkoff

What causes recessions? Many economists talk about the need for a consumer economy, but we can't have a consumer economy if people can't afford to consume, and the only way they can afford to consume over the long run is if they create new wealth to either consume at that time or to defer as investments for later consumption. Simply put, the best way to have a functioning economy is to focus on having a wealth-producing economy. But when wealth can't be created in spite of the need for such, the production of wealth has been artificially limited, and this artificial limitation is the root cause of business recessions. ~ Martin Adams

As an economist specializing in the global economy, international trade and debt, I have spent most of my career helping others make big decisions - prime ministers, presidents and chief executives - and so I'm all too aware of the risks and dangers of poor choices in the public as well as the private sphere. ~ Noreena Hertz

Small businesses are the backbone of our economy. ~ Ellen Tauscher

By investing in anonymous
cryptocurrencies, you are buying 'insurance' against a recession, as the value of the cryptocurrency could increase significantly if the economy falters and the black market grows. ~ Will Martin

I personally don't believe we ought to be raising taxes or cutting spending, either one, until we get this economy off the ground. I'll pay more, but it won't solve the problem. ~ William J. Clinton

I suspected that most marriages were more complicated than couples tended to let on. That summer, it seemed like every week brought news of another pair in our community who were splitting up. They were all around our age, most with little kids, trying to run their own businesses in a small economy. The evidence of those breakups directly contradicted the rosy way relationships were portrayed on Facebook, in public. I began to believe that future generations would study how we represent our long-term partnerships, and call us on our lies, in the same way we look at the way the Victorians depicted sex and know that it simply wasn't like that, not behind closed doors or in the hayloft. We hide marital conflict with the same sense of decorum. We'd do more good if we were honest and set realistic expectations for what it's like in the long run. ~ Kristin Kimball

The best short stories and the most successful jokes have a lot in common. Each form relies on suggestion and economy. Characters have to be drawn in a few deft strokes. There's generally a setup, a reveal, a reversal, and a release. ~ Geraldine Brooks

Political economy came into being as a natural result of the expansion of trade, and with its appearance elementary, unscientific huckstering was replaced by a developed system of licensed fraud, an entire science of enrichment. ~ Friedrich Engels

The world will not end. This is ridiculous. I think it's like 2000. It's a great trick to do business and earn lots of money because stupid people hoard things. This is a stimulator of the economy. ~ Ronnie Radke

You don't build a 100 ft robot out of nothing ... there's rumors and gossip, trace evidence. There's a shadow economy out there, where these things get done. ~ Austin Grossman

Law of economy: nothing is waste. Even the unreal. What a sublimity in the process. ~ Philip K. Dick

I think the American people should see that the corporations abandoned them long ago. That people will have to build their own economies and rebuild democracy as a living democracy. The corporations belong to no land, no country, no people. They have no loyalty to anything apart from their profits. And the profits today are on an unimaginable scale; it has become illegitimate, criminal profit - profits extracted at the cost of life. ~ Vandana Shiva

The 'cash for clunkers' program was a big success in part because it gave people the sense that the economy was moving. ~ Cass Sunstein

If we as a society want to cure unemployment, raise real wages, and in other ways improve our economy, we will base public policy on private property rights, the non-aggression principle and the law of free association. In the free and prosperous society, everyone may do precisely as he pleases, provided only that he does not initiate violence against non-aggressors. ~ Walter Block

The problem is that the economy isn't growing fast enough to accommodate the level of spending produced through the democratic process. ~ Jack Kemp

Between reaction and revolution there is nothing to choose. Neither leave the track, they just allow different people to drive while the same people are run over. ~ Heather Marsh

Near-term deficits are temporary and manageable if - and only if - we keep spending in check, the tax burden low and the economy growing. ~ Jim Nussle

I'm cautious about the currency situation, oil pricing and the economies of some countries not performing as we are expecting. ~ Lakshmi

Unless the number of people who are labeled felons is dramatically reduced, and unless the laws and policies that keep ex-offenders marginalized from the mainstream society and economy are eliminated, the system will continue to create and maintain an enormous undercaste. ~ Michelle Alexander

Public grazing provides just one dollar out of every $2,500 of taxable income in the West, or 0.04 percent, and just one out of everything 1,400 jobs, or 0.07 percent. On both public and private lands in the eleven Western states, the livestock industry accounts for less than 0.5 percent of all income. ~ Christopher Ketcham

In essence, then, the common picture of economic thought after Smith needs to be reversed. In the conventional view, Adam Smith, the towering founder, by his theoretical genius and by the sheer weight of his knowledge of institutional facts, single-handedly created the discipline of political economy as well as the public policy of the free market, and did so out of a jumble of mercantilist fallacies and earlier absurd scholastic notions of a 'just price'. The real story is almost the opposite. Before Smith, centuries of scholastic analysis had developed an excellent value theory and monetary theory, along with corresponding free market and hard-money conclusions. Originally embedded among the scholastics in a systematic framework of property rights and contract law based on natural law theory, economic theory ~ Anonymous

So this is the boom, eh?" I said. "Not exactly Scott Fitzgerald, is it?" "I'll tell you what it's like," he said glumly. "It's like being in Caligula's Rome, and everyone around you's having an orgy, and you're the mug stuck looking after the horse." He pulled heavily on his cigarette. "The whole thing'll come crashing down," he said bleakly, "and all anyone'll have done is eaten a lot of expensive cheese. ~ Paul Murray

In the economy of the cuckoo people that populate central banks, everything is possible. What you have is gigantic bubbles, the NASDAQ in 2000, then the housing bubble and then commodities in 2008 when oil went from $78 to $147 before plunging to $32 within six months. ~ Marc Faber

I have not made any suggestions about climate change. This is more about blending or shifting the conversation about the environment versus the economy. It's just such an old, outdated conversation. ~ Jennifer Granholm

. . . 'science' was now called on to sanction and sanctify existing social relations. According to Malthus, it was wholly desirable that political economy be 'taught to the common people.' Thanks to it, the poor would understand that they must attribute the cause of their privations to Mother Nature or their own improvidence. ~ Domenico Losurdo

The 10 largest antitrust law firms in the United States have gone into the federal courts charging Monsanto with creating a global conspiracy in violation of the antitrust laws, to control the global market in seeds. ~ Jeremy Rifkin

As recently as the early 1970s, a Republican president - Richard Nixon - was willing to impose wage and price controls to rescue the U.S. economy from crisis, popularizing the notion that "We are all Keynesians now." But by the 1980s, the battle of ideas waged out of the same Washington think tanks that now deny climate change had successfully managed to equate the very idea of industrial planning with Stalin's five-year plans. Real capitalists don't plan, these ideological warriors insisted - they unleash the power of the profit motive and let the market, in its infinite wisdom, create the best possible society for all. ~ Naomi Klein

I think one of the most important skills of a local organizer of a local economy is an ability to put on a terrific street party. ~ David Korten

If government wishes to see a depression ended as quickly as possible and the economy returned to normal prosperity, what course should it adopt? The first and clearest injunction is: Don't interfere with the market's adjustment process. ~ Murray Rothbard

It is ludicrous to believe that asset bubbles can only be recognized in hindsight," he wrote. "There are specific identifiers that are entirely recognizable during the bubble's inflation. One hallmark of mania is the rapid rise in the incidence and complexity of fraud ... . The FBI reports mortgage-related fraud is up fivefold since 2000." Bad behavior was no longer on the fringes of an otherwise sound economy; it was its central feature. ~ Michael Lewis

Revenge for a terror attack is ideal for Putin's model. His propaganda machine will be filled with scenes of crash victims if [Vladimir] Putin sees the need for a larger war to stoke his domestic support again as the Russian economy teeters. ~ Garry Kasparov

President Bush has said that the economy is growing, that there are jobs out there. But you know, it's a long commute to China to get those jobs. ~ Tom Daschle