Part I: Rationales for a third way approach: Chapter 2: The informalisation of the advanced economies.

This chapter evaluates critically the formalization thesis, which asserts that non-capitalist production is disappearing, albeit slowly and unevenly, and is being replaced by goods and services produced by capitalist firms for a profit under conditions of market exchange. The great transformation from a non-market to a market society, upon which many of the current assumptions about economic development are founded, must be thus treated with caution. Nor, moreover, is this persistence of informal work simply due to the social reproduction of marginal populations being offloaded from the formal to the informal sphere. Whatever the reason for their persistence, the important finding of this chapter is that informal economic activities are a large and growing segment of economic life, at least measured in terms of the time spent engaged in such work.