Role of Informal Economies in the Post-Soviet World

Colin C. Williams is Professor of Public Policy at the Management School at Sheffield University, UK.John Round is Senior Lecturer in Human Geography, School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Birmingham.Peter Rodgers is Lecturer in Strategy and International Business, Management School, University of Sheffield, UK.

• 1. Introduction: Part I (Re)theorising Transition Economies 2. Re-visiting the recurring question of transition 3. Re-theorising the economic 4. Beyond the formal/informal economy dualism: unpacking the diverse economies of post-Soviet societies Part II The Lived Experience of Transition 5. The role of the informal in the formal sphere 6. Informal employment 7. One-to-one unpaid labour, reimbursed family work and paid favours 8. Formal and informal unpaid employment 9. The internal economies of the household 10. Conclusions

"The authors challenge the very notion of market transition as that of moving from command and control plan-based economy to a market one. Instead, they offer a true mosaic of post-Soviet transformation, a largely incomplete and frequently confusing multifaceted non-linear process...I strongly encourage everyone interested in post- Soviet transformations to read this book. A landmark work on informal economies, it offers a totally new perspective on economies in transition. Moreover, it serves as a methodological sample work for similar possible future studies of socio-economic transformations in different parts of the world. This brilliant work that proves that the adjective ‘ethnographic’ is directly related to another adjective ‘economic’, may be regarded as nothing less than an alternative and insightful interpretation of post-Soviet transformation." - Ararat L. Osipian, Vanderbilt University