Political Economy of Informality in BRIC Countries brings together highly original analysis and debates on the politics of informality, paying special attention to the context of BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China). The questions and puzzles addressed in this book are nevertheless relevant for any developing country in the world. Hence the volume can be either read from a BRIC perspective or as a collection of political economy topics on the politics of informality in global South.
This volume represents a unique collection of organized chapters dealing with a variety of approaches to the study of diverse manifestations of informality. The first section of the volume is dedicated to tax revenue, globalization, and informality in BRIC countries. Section two of the volume is dedicated to the problem of informal settlements, public goods, and basic service provision. Section three of the volume analyzes different aspects of labor informality, and its relationship with political mobilization and policy preferences. The volume serves as an essential reference for scholars of political economy in developing countries, policy makers, international organizations, and anyone who is interested in the field.
Contents:
- Introduction: Political Economy Approaches to Informality and Recent Trends in BRIC Countries (Santiago López-Cariboni)
- Tax Revenue, Globalization, and Informality in BRIC Countries:
- A Comparative Analysis of Tax System in the BRICs and the Challenges Ahead: Informality and the Fiscal Contract (Laura Seelkopf and Armin von Schiller)
- Is Informal Work Eroding Compliance? (Sarah Berens and Irene Menéndez)
- Can Tax Aid Broaden the Base? International Assistance, Taxation, and the Informal Sector in the BRICs (Ida Bastiaens and Laura Seelkopf)
- Informal Settlements and Basic Service Provision:
- Social Capital, Leadership Accountability and Public Services in the Slums of India (Guadalupe Rojo)
- Informal Electricity Consumption and Political Regimes: Implications for Political Change in BRIC Countries (Santiago López-Cariboni)
- Labor Market Informality, Mobilization, and Preferences:
- How the Labor Force is Mobilized: Patterns in Informality, Political Networks, and Political Linkages in Brazil (Soledad Artiz Prillaman and Jonathan Phillips)
- Redistributive Preferences in Contemporary Brazil (Luis Maldonado and María Constanza Ayala)
- Understanding Informality in China: Institutional Causes and Subsequent Measurement Issues (Yujeong Yang and Wei-Ting Yen)
- Insiders, Outsiders, and the Politics of Employment Protection: Insights from the Brazilian Case (Santiago López-Cariboni)
- Conclusions (Santiago López-Cariboni)
Readership: Academics, professionals and graduates interested in the political economy of the BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa).
Santiago López-Cariboni is an Assistant Professor at the Universidad Católica del Uruguay. He writes on both comparative and international political economy. He received a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Essex in 2014. His primary research interests are in international and comparative political economy. His work focuses on the analysis of international trade and domestic policy in developing countries, labor informality and social policy, and informal access to basic services. His recent publications have appeared in the Review of International Organizations, Politics & Society, and Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis.
About the Contributors
María Constanza Ayala is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. She holds a Master of Science in Statistics from KU Leuven. Her research focuses mainly on educational outcomes, gender and racial discrimination, and quantitative methodology in the social sciences.
Ida Bastiaens is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Fordham University. She received her B.A. from Davidson College and her Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh. She specializes in international political economy and international development. Her research analyzes questions on the political determinants of integration in the global economy, the impact of international integration on fiscal and social welfare in developing countries, and citizen preferences for global capital flows. She recently published a co-authored book with Cambridge University Press and journal articles in International Interactions, Journal of European Public Policy, and Review of International Political Economy.
Sarah Berens is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Cologne Center for Comparative Politics at University of Cologne. She received her Ph.D. from the joint graduate program of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies and University of Cologne. During her Ph.D., she spent a year at Columbia University. In her research, she focuses on the micro-foundation of labor informality, social policy, taxation, and the behavioral impacts of crime experience in low- and middle-income countries. Her work has been published in Socio-Economic Review, Political Behavior, Political Studies, the Journal of Politics in Latin America, and Social Policy & Administration.
Luis Maldonado is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the Pontificia Universidad Católica of Chile, with affiliation to The Research Center for Integrated Risk Management (CIGIDEN), Chile. His research focuses on economic inequality, disasters, and quantitative methods. His recent studies have been published in Public Health, the International Journal of Educational Development, Journal of Politics in Latin America, and Computers in Human Behavior.
Irene Menéndez is an Assistant Professor of International Political Economy at the IE School of Global and Public Affairs She obtained a Ph.D. at the University of Oxford (Nuffield College) in 2015. Her research interests include international and comparative political economy, the political consequences of globalization, the political economy of labor markets, and redistribution and the effects of electoral institutions on political representation. Her work appears in various journals such as the American Political Science Review, International Studies Quarterly, and the Socio-Economic Review.
Jonathan Phillips is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of São Paulo, specializing in comparative politics and the political economy of development. He received his Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University in 2017, an M.Sc. in Development Economics from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, in 2008, and a B.A. in Politics and Economics from Oxford University in 2005. His research seeks to explain the political roots of effective governance, clarifying the incentives that lead some politicians to focus on enforcing clear programmatic rules while others condition access to public resources on political support. Through subnational comparisons across primary fieldwork sites in Brazil, Nigeria, and India, he is developing new datasets, tools, and theories to explain the wide variation in the quality and form of public service delivery.
Soledad Artiz Prillaman is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Stanford University. She received a Ph.D. in Government at Harvard University in 2017 and a B.A. in Political Science and Economics from Texas A&M University in 2011. Her research interests lie at the intersections of comparative political economy, development, gender, and the politics of the welfare state, with a focus in South Asia and Latin America. She is motivated by questions such as the following: What are the political consequences of development and development policies? How are minorities democratically represented and where do inequalities in political engagement persist? How are voter demands, particularly of underrepresented populations, translated into policy and governance? In answering these questions, she utilizes mixed methods, including field experiments, primary surveys, and in-depth qualitative fieldwork, to identify empirical relationships as well as the underlying causal mechanisms.
Guadalupe Rojo is an invited Professor at the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella. She holds a Ph.D. in Political Science (Duke University 2017), an M.A. in Economics (Duke University 2014), and an M.A. in Latin American studies (Stanford University 2010). Guadalupe has conducted research on the effect of social capital on public services and the electoral return on government investments in infrastructure in shantytowns, both in Argentina and India. She currently works in the housing and urban development division at the IADB, with a focus on impact evaluations for slum upgrading programs.
Armin von Schiller is a research fellow at the German Development Institute/Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik (DIE). His research is focused on taxation, tax morale, and fiscal decentralization in developing countries with a special emphasis on how political factors shape the use of different tax instruments and the willingness of citizens to pay taxes. Before joining DIE, he worked at the German Institute for Human Rights and the GIZ (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit) in Colombia. He has done consulting work for GIZ, the European Commission, and UNU-WIDER among other organizations. Armin holds a Ph.D. from the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin.
Laura Seelkopf is an Assistant Professor of Political Science (W1) at the Geschwister Scholl Institute, Ludwig Maximilians University Munich, Germany. Her substantive research focus is on the political economy of taxation (tax competition, tax evasion, and the transformation of tax states around the world) and comparative social policy (inside and outside developed economies, by non-state actors, and via non-traditional policies).
Yujeong Yang is an Assistant Professor in the Political Science Department at the State University of New York, Cortland. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Michigan. Her research focuses on comparative political economy, welfare policies, and labor politics, with a regional expertise in China.
Wei-Ting Yen is an Assistant Professor at Franklin and Marshall College with a concurrent appointment as a Mellon High Impact Emerging Scholar. She studies political economy issues and social policy development in the developing world. Her main research is to understand the demand side politics of social protection in young democracies, where a majority of citizens have job insecurity and income instability. She earned her Ph.D. in Political Science from the Ohio State University.
