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.
Read More...Posted by in Blogging @ 11 11 05 | One comment / No trackbacks
