Heft36 1 - SFB 580 - Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena

ABEL POLESE
obtain extra money from students in times of
economic crisis when university expenditures
are low? This also means that students,
becoming a source of revenue for the university,
are untouchable. To fail a student means to get
into trouble as a professor, who would even
risk being fired. This is an extra motivation to
allow cheating on exams. The result is a huge
fraud to the state, with universities producing
unprepared students, while professors and
faculty receive extra money and many students
enter the job market with a (fake) degree. All
this occurs while the state is trying to persuade
universities to implement the Bologna process
and teachers to use ‘interactive teaching’
methods during their classes. The main looser is
the job market. Students might learn a job even
with little university education. The problem
is that they learn that such behaviours like
paying for an exam or cheating are tolerated in
society and might continue this tradition when
working.
THE INFORMAL SECTOR: PROBLEM OR SOLUTION
OF TRANSITION?
What do the actors mentioned above have
in common? The first element is a desire or
necessity to engage in informal transactions
with other fellow citizens. The nature of those
relationships is always fluid, oscillating between
the legal and the illegal, depending on the point
of view (and on the moral code) adopted.
However, they also have in common a conflictual
relationship with the state or its subordinates.
In the case of a public worker, this is all
the more visible, as it is direct: the state either
does not pay enough, pays late, or does not pay
at all (Polese 2006b, 2008). The case of the
pensioners is also similar, with the state not
providing enough to live on. Where we have
a doctor in a hospital or a teacher accepting
informal payments, we have somebody else
paying. The fates of the above mentioned
people are, thus, entangled, each receives and
gives money depending on the situation and
the economy turns. Perhaps not the way the
government would like, but we have circulation
of liquidity and a quasi functioning economic
system.
The case of the private worker is less direct, but
it is important to remember here that, where
the state is in charge of the management of a
country, it normally has two options – it either
takes care of all the sectors (central planned
economy) or creates the conditions for external
institutions to regulate the economic life of
the country. Neither of the mentioned options
applies to Ukraine, where employees have little
defence against their employers, who in turn
have little defence against larger companies
and so on.
The case studies explored are situations generating
tensions, directly or indirectly, between
the citizen and the state. However, because of
the political situation in Ukraine, it might not
always be possible to directly oppose political
decisions or confront the political elites, as it
might happen in a country with more
interaction between the political
class and the people. The best way page 211
people can cope is to officially accept
the change but then de facto reject
it. Informal economies, thus, may be seen as
generated by tensions between the state and
the citizen. But change, the shift of an equi-