Heft36 1 - SFB 580 - Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena
Heft36 1 - SFB 580 - Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena
Heft36 1 - SFB 580 - Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena
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AT THE ORIGINS OF INFORMAL ECONOMIES:<br />
THE UKRAINIAN CASE<br />
ABSTRACT<br />
AT THE ORIGINS OF INFORMAL ECONOMIES:<br />
SOME EVIDENCE FROM UKRAINE<br />
(1991-2009)<br />
Abel Polese<br />
9<br />
Drawing evidence from participant<br />
observations and informal interviews<br />
between 2003 and 2009, when the<br />
author spent around four years working in<br />
Ukraine as a lecturer and consultant in the non<br />
governmental sector, this article explores the<br />
conditions that make the informal sector blossom<br />
in transitional countries. In this respect, it<br />
will be suggested, informal economies originate<br />
from tensions between citizens and the state,<br />
in which the former feels compelled to respect<br />
decisions and policies imposed from the latter<br />
with no possibility to express their opinions or<br />
react politically.<br />
In such a context, the only way to react is to<br />
use informal economies as weapons of the weak<br />
(Scott 1984). Through informal payments,<br />
(petty) fiscal fraud or suitcase smuggling,<br />
people may reverse the effects of state decisions<br />
that are not tailored to a local context. This, in<br />
turn, may allow people to participate politically<br />
even when a participatory democracy is not<br />
immediately available (Gupta 1995).<br />
INTRODUCTION<br />
page 200<br />
Ukraine gained independence in 1991. Coming<br />
out of a period of nationalist movements, worker<br />
and student strikes as well as an attempted<br />
golpe, the future president Leonid Kravchuk<br />
played the card of a radical rupture with the<br />
past in the hope to rapidly gain stability and<br />
sustainability.<br />
Although a full republic within the USSR,<br />
Ukraine still lacked some of the international