Doctoral Dissertation Research: Factors Influencing Informal Market Sector Emergence

Stanford University, Stanford CA

Investigators

Abstract

This project investigates what variables contribute to the emergence and new informal economic sectors, and what socioeconomic impacts these sectors have on trade and exchange. Industrial labor and formal, waged employment has declined in many countries across the world, accompanied by the shrinking of state-sponsored social security. Informal, precarious, and temporary modes of making a living have risen in their place. In many parts of the world, this arrangement is a harbinger of an economic future where ethnic, religious, and kinship relations figure more prominently in socioeconomic stability and access to resources. This project, which trains a graduate student in methods of conducting empirically-grounded scientific research, explores the factors that contribute to the emergence and durability of new informal sectors. The project has important implications for analyzing market behavior in critically understudied economic zones, where current economic policies are often unable to account for robust, yet unquantifiable "informal" sectors. Grace Zhou, under the supervision of Dr. Sylvia Yanagisako of Stanford University, will explore the implications of inequalities of privatization and liberalization in the economic sphere, which often produce unexpected solidarities that have the power to challenge existing hierarchies. Nowhere is the emergence and dominance of informal economies more apparent than in post-Soviet Central Asia, where the Soviet developmental state left behind few employment and government supports after its retreat. The research will take place in Osh, Kyrgyzstan, a major trading city between China and Russia, where the growing prominence of informal markets in the economic, social and physical landscape has become a symbol of the ineffective state. With little public trust in state institutions, amidst increasing dependence on the market's uneven distributive functions, marginalized communities are forging alternative routes for the distribution of resources and services. Research methods include interviews, participant observation, and social network analysis of individuals working in the informal sector. In conducting research on marginal groups in a key market hub of the region, this project will shed light on important new formations arising out of a tumultuous global economy. Exploring livelihoods that are based on a growing, vernacular tertiary sector has broader implications for public understandings of economic ingenuity, social mobility, and interpersonal exchange between heterogeneous groups of people.