Europe develops a developing world economy

The stark facts from this amazing New York Times analysis:

Spain's official unemployment rate is 24 percent
     --and analysts expect it to vault beyond 30 percent.
Unemployment of 16-24 year-olds is now more than 50 percent.
In more than 1 in ten Spanish households, no one holds a job.
In the past year, the Spanish economy has hemorrhaged 100 billion euros (approx. $132 billion).
Analysts expect the country's economy to continue to shrink.

Check out the contrast:
Nigeria's unemployment rate is approximately the same as Spain's -- 23.9 percent.
And, as another NYT story reported recently, while Nigeria's urban unemployment is at an unconscionable level--nearly 50 percent for people ages 15 to 24--that's actually better than the situation for young people in Spain.
But the Nigerian economy is, at least, growing by almost 8 percent a year, making it the 3rd fasted growing economy in the world.

Conclusion:  in terms of the economic indicators, Spain is now a developing world country.

We are the 92 percent

92 percent of India's workforce is in the informal sector/System D. That's 460 million people. But, as this op-ed from My Digital Financial Chronicle points out, "from a rights perspective, this simply means that the ‘formal’ sector policeman can evict the ‘informal’ sector vegetable vendor from the street corner near your house on a whim."


India's National Association of Street Vendors is trying to re-engineer the way the government thinks about street vendors and other System D workers and to reverse years of systematic repression and discrimination.

(note: a few weeks back, I blogged about a different article that said 94 percent of India's workforce was informal. 94, 92: the exact number is impossible to gauge. But they're both amazingly huge numbers. System D thoroughly dominates the Indian labor market. It's time to stop criminalizing these efforts.) 

problem or solution?

Street hawkers have multiplied recently in New Delhi's Connaught Place, and the Daily Mail newspaper claims that the entrepreneurial invasion is blocking traffic and 'compounding the misery of commuters.' Though the police claim that only 97 vendors work around the circular shopping arena, the newspaper counted 800 street sellers.

I was in Connaught Place late last year--and the big culprit for congestion was the government's rehabilitation plan, which involves tearing up vast swatches of the circular market and is creating massive interference of traffic and pedestrian flow. There were hawkers all around the market--and I can well believe there were 800 of them spread around the various lanes of the Connaught Place installation--but they hardly were the impediment the newspaper makes them out to be. Their stalls were orderly and blocking traffic (the Daily Mail's own photo shows a hawkers market that is not blocking traffic.) Indeed, the biggest impediments in the market were the sad profusion of stray dogs, who seem to be almost universally despised by merchants and commuters alike and the number of empty storefronts--most likely a result of speculation that rents will go up following the completion of the government's rehab effort.

Being punitive towards the hawkers is no solution. Rather, it's important to work with the street vendors to improve conditions for everyone.

Maputo relents

Rescinding a ban on street vending passed in late February, the government of Mozambique's capital has vowed that it is not against the city's 80,000 hawkers and roadside sellers, Mayor David Simango has announced.

Simango told vendors from the massive Estrela, Mandela 1 and 2, and Museu markets that he never intended to shut down all street trading and that his hope was only to stop people selling outside schools, hospitals and other sensitive establishments. "We are not against the activity of the informal sector, since we know that people are selling on the streets not out of pleasure, but as a question of need for their survival," the Mayor said. "But we have to find ways of developing informal trade without creating problems for everybody else."

Simango apparently wants vendors to clean the streets around their stalls twice a day (the current requirement is twice a week), to obey the rule requiring them to cease doing business by 9 pm, and to cease doing business on streets near schools and hospitals. While appropriate street cleaning may make sense, the ban on nighttime selling and the idea that vendors should voluntarily leave locations where demand is high seem counterintuitive and counterproductive.

AllAfrica has details.

the harsh life of a street vendor -- in Oakland, CA

The New York Times & Bay Citizen report on the gun violence that plagues East Oakland's International Boulevard, one of the only streets open to mobile vendors. A five-year-old died on New Year's Eve, hit by a stray bullet from a barrage directed at his father's taco truck.

There are only 34 licensed vendors but 126 members of the recently formed vendor's association--suggesting that the majority of vendors are part of America's informal economy.

magicians are political -- philosophical interlude 2

• Magicians are political

• There is an injustice concealed within the justice of the marketplace, since a promise rigorously kept is itself a trap. The two way dealing of buyer and seller works only because of a two-way deception; for each of them always pretends that he has no need of the other.

• The same god who will run to the marketplace tomorrow, the one who will ring the opening of the stock exchange; the god of the closing and the final bid; the god who posts under his own name the just prices which are never just.

• Without the noise of the street vendors nothing would get done and nothing would be thought.

These fragments come from Alain (Emile-Auguste Chartier), The Gods

it takes a tough person to make a tender vender

Two different versions -- one censored by the Chinese authorities, one unexpurgated -- of Tricia Wang's adventures with a family trying to break into unlicensed street vending in Shanghai. It's a tough life, whether censored or uncensored.

[another tip of the fedora to Zach for sending these street stories my way]