The Informal Economy in Development: Evidence from German, British and Australian New Guinea

Abstract

This study deals with the informal economy observed in developing countries, a focus inspired by the anthropologist Keith Hart’s recognition of informal economic activity in 1960s Ghana. There, as in other ‘under-developed’ territories and newly-independent states, economic informality was associated with colonialism and the subsequent ideology of ‘economic development’ that took hold among the Western victors of World War II. Economic informality arose under colonial influence because of the imposition of bureaucratic rule and the forced introduction or intensification of market processes. The metaphor of popular pushback against such pressures is useful to understand how subject peoples accommodated themselves to colonialism, with results including both informal and hybrid economic behaviours. With the idea of informal economy employed as a lens, The Informal Economy in Development explores these themes across historical experience in the former German, British and Australian colonies in New Guinea, now incorporated as the modern state of Papua New Guinea.