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The “Informal sector” category encompasses books that examine economic activities and livelihoods occurring outside full state regulation, taxation, and standard employment contracts. Titles in this area explore street vending, home-based enterprises, day labor, domestic work, waste picking, small-scale manufacturing, cross-border petty trade, and parts of the gig/platform economy across both the Global South and high-income countries. Common themes include survival strategies and entrepreneurship, precarious work and resilience, gender and migration, youth employment, links between informal and formal value chains, access to finance and microcredit, social protection gaps, labor rights and organizing, urban governance and public space, and policy debates around regulation and formalization. Drawing on ethnography, development economics, sociology, and law, these books analyze how informality shapes poverty and inequality, city life and markets, and how technology, regulation, and shocks such as COVID-19 affect workers and microenterprises.

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