Abstract

SAMANIEGO, Norma. The Explosive Growth of Informal Economy. Economía UNAM [online]. 2008, vol.5, n.13, pp.30-41. ISSN 1665-952X.

During the last decades, informal economy in Mexico has registered an overflowing growth. Today, informal economy represents -according to the author-one of the main problems in the country's economic and social development, generating precariousness, poverty and low productivity. Far from being seen from a passive perspective, informality --considered as an escape mechanism in response to the imbalances existing within labor market-- represents a basic problem that needs urgent attention of economic and social policies. Among its causes, literature has mentioned the lack of good job positions in relation to the growth of labour force, the decentralization of productive processes outside the enterprises, and the voluntary exclusion from the normative frame that regulates formal economy. In the author's opinion, to lower informality requires increasing the growing rythm of the economy and its productivity. In addition, it requires improving the regulations that prevail in the labor market, as well as promoting a long-term agenda that includes the validity of a better social contract in which exclusion is lowered in an important way and in which the incentives that induce informality today are eliminated.

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