Purpose – This paper aims to evaluate whether early-stage entrepreneurs and the established self-employed in rural communities trade off-the-books and whether this tendency varies across deprived and affluent rural localities. Design/methodology/approach – Face-to-face interviews were...

Over the past decade or so, there has been widespread recognition that a large and growing proportion of the global workforce is employed in informal sector enterprises. To explain this, neo-liberals contend that enterprises operate in the informal sector due to high taxes, public sector...

Purpose – A recurring assumption across the social sciences is that non-commodified work has been increasingly replaced by the commodified sphere in which goods and services are produced and delivered for monetary exchange by capitalist firms for profit-motivated purposes. The purpose of this...

The conventional portrayal of the formal/informal economy dichotomy endows the formal economy with positive attributes and the informal economy with negative characteristics. Recently, this hierarchy has been inverted by scholars portraying the informal economy positively as a chosen alternative...