Being outside of legal relations of employers and employees doesn't mean being outside of the global circuits of capital. Afghanistan may be extreme, but the predominance of the informal sector is hardly unique to it:
* "In the case of Peru, it has been calculated that, in general terms, the equivalent of 38 percent of gross domestic product and 60 percent of man-hours worked take place in the informal sector (De Soto et al. 1986: 13)" (at <http://www.cato.org/pubs/journal/cj17n1-8.html>);
* "On average, according to the World Bank, the informal sector in Africa is estimated to have accounted for 42% of gross domestic product in 1999/2000 - in South Africa the figure was 28%" (at <http://www.suntimes.co.za/2003/10/12/business/news/news05.asp>);
* "For all regions in the world, except in South-Eastern Asia (a region which has known a rapid industrialisation in the recent period until the 1997 financial crisis which has abruptly the process, and the impact of which is not taken into account in the present statistics), and in Northern, the proportion of non-agricultural self-employment (i.e. non-wage employment) has steadily increased over the past three decades. From 33.4 per cent in the 70's, self-employment rose up to 43.7 per cent in Southern Asia, from 23.0 to 34.0 per cent in North Africa, from 28.8 to 37.8 per cent in Latin America, from 3.5 to 8.5 per cent in transition countries of Eastern Europe (which started from quasi-universal wage employment outside agriculture) and even from 20.9 to 25.0 per cent in Southern (Mediterranean) Europe. So that in the current period, self-employment represents nearly 1/3 of the total non-agricultural labour force in Asia, 2/5 in Latin America, 1/6 in Europe (but 1/4 in Southern Europe) and 1/10 in North America. Sub-Saharan Africa takes however the lion's share with an increase from 29.6 per cent in the 70's to 66.9 per cent in the 90's (more than 2/3 of the non-agricultural labour force). At world level, self-employment increased from less than 1/4 (22.6 percent) to 28.4 percent of the labour force outside agriculture. Such a figure can be taken as a minimum proxy for the informal sector, and it could be improved and it is actually confirmed by using the data collected by informal sector surveys, as shown in tables 5, 6 and 7 hereafter: according to the most recent surveys, the share of self-employment in total non-agricultural labour force rose up to 75.6 percent in the 90's" (at <http://www.wiego.org/papers/charmes2.pdf>).
In short, the trend since the 1970s is a rapid growth of the informal sector of economic activities, a large segment of which is clearly illegal. -- Yoshie
* Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>