French riots in a wider perspective
John Robb of global guerilla's framed ongoing riots in France as a struggle between participants of the formal versus the informal economy, triggered by a crackdown on the informal economy launched by the French interior minister. This frame of reference resonates with my own experiences when I visited Rouen last year; most economic opportunities in the suburbs are outside the formal economy. I did not encounter a single business hiring employees (I saw plenty in Brugge a day earlier). This is not a war between faiths or convictions, but between economies. And I do not think it is unique to France; it has a lot of different incarnations, for example we saw a glimpse in The Netherlands last year. Whenever the formal economy excludes a population segment to the point where most economic opportunities are outside the legal realm, the seeds are sown and a crackdown on the illegal economy can spark just this kind of disorder. This whole affair reminds me of the analisys of Hernando de Soto on informal economies.
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