L'economia informale ed i suoi confini con il settore formale nei paesi del Sud del mondo

The present paper outsets some of the most meaningful theoretical and empirical frameworks on the issue of informal economy that have been mainly developed in the southern world countries. Such approaches represent, on one hand, attempts of interpreting informal economy basically assuming the dichotomy of formal/informal sectors - though the dichotomy itself disguised difficulties in its practical application – and, on the other, attempts of interpreting and explaining micro-foundations of informal economic relationships, focussing particularly on the concrete situations where social actors act, on the effects of the interactions among them, and on the continuous mixing of formal and informal factors in the actions’ structures. Thus, informality emerges in its entire complexity and encourages the use of inductive logics and interpretations that belong to various disciplines. The interdisciplinary approach, on one hand, improved our understanding of particular informal activities embedded in specific contexts, but, on the other hand, it seems to complicate the search for a clear and ambivalence-free definition of informal economy.