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How does informal economic activity respond to increased financial inclusion? Does it become more entrepreneurial? Does access to new financing options change the gender configuration of informal economic activity and, if so, in what ways and what directions? We take advantage of nationwide data collected in 2010/11 and 2015/16 by India's National Sample Survey Office on unorganized (informal) enterprises. This period was one of rapid expansion of banking availability aimed particularly at the unbanked, under-banked, and women. We find strong empirical evidence supporting the crucial role of financial access in promoting entrepreneurship among informal sector firms in India. Our results are robust to alternative specifications and alternative measures of financial constraints using an approach combining propensity score matching and difference-in-differences. However, we do not find conclusive evidence that increased financial inclusion leads to a higher likelihood of women becoming entrepreneurs than men in the informal sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

India's waste is growing fast; so is its research, and so is the informal economy in which it is embedded. Here research on a small-town waste economy (WE) is situated in the literature on urban informal waste, making three contributions. First, an analytical grid is placed over this small-town formal-informal waste economy in terms of its circuits of capital in the generation of waste. These comprise factory production, physical and economic distribution, consumption, the production of labour and the reproduction of society. Second, field evidence for this waste economy is used to interrogate the three prevailing approaches to theorising informality, revealing how social and economic segmentation can simultaneously drive all three theorised relationships in a complementary fashion. Third, the municipal government's fragmented architecture and informal bureaucratic behaviour reveal not only severely compromised management capacities but also the local state's paradoxical dependence on, and distance from, the informal waste economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]