SHADOW ECONOMY

Moonlit money
Working 'off-the-books' fits the mood of the times. But where is it taking us? And who is driving? Vanessa Baird investigates.

The new order
Walter Johnson on what informal work is doing to labour relations.

Disposable workers
A new import from the South. Celia Mather reports.

The art of arrangement
Boom time in Italy. Judy Gahagan reveals its darker secrets.

AUSTRALIAN MOONLIGHTER

What can be done... to help the subterranean economy emerge?
An illustrated brief for helping the urban poor in the Third World.

Dodging the dues
Who are the tax dodgers? And how do they salve their consciences? Juliet Kellner asks them.

Taxing poverty
Quite the wrong people pay tax in the Third World, John Tanner discovers.

UNDERGROUND WORK - THE FACTS

Spotlighting on the shadows
KS Karol in the USSR.

PERUVIAN HAWKER

'I am from Deogarh'
A short story by Tony Vaux.

SIMPLY. Off the books

Snorting disaster
Neil MacDonald looks at the drugs underworld and what coke has done to tin.

COLOMBIAN PIMP

Worth Reading

Breaking rules is fun. So are stories about people doing so. It was therefore not hard to think of colourful examples and commission a bunch of lively articles for this issue of the NI on the subject of underground work.

It might have been quite fun, as guest editor, to just leave it there. But that might have left you, the reader, with an empty feeling - like you had just eaten six vol-au-vents when it was actually a three-course meal that you ordered.

There were nagging questions. For instance: does it matter that more and more people in the world today are working illegally, outside the regular economy? And who benefits? The answers did not, I must admit, smack me between the eyes or make me leap like Archimedes from his bath.

The variety of the subject was so dazzling, peopled by characters pursuing activities of vastly varying degrees of trickery. How could you put, for example, the tax-dodging, moonlighting, computer salesman into the same bag as the shoeshine boy trying to make out on the streets of a Third World city?

Then there was the million dollar question that NI co-editors are prone to ask: 'What is your line? Are you saying it's a good thing or a bad thing?'

'Um,' I think I replied and went away to think about it, read about it, talk to people about it and with people who were doing it. Memory came in handy too. Who can honestly say they have never done a bit of work off-the-books or used the services of somebody who was doing so?

What had started me thinking about the underground - or the informal sector - was spending a couple of years in Latin America. You could not avoid it there. Most of the population were making a living in ways that were strictly speaking illegal.

For them there were no taxes to pay, no rules to obey, but no safety nets either.

Observers said it was great: people were creating jobs for themselves in a free market It did seem a funny sort of freedom, though, with poor people working like crazy and getting poorer, and rich people not appearing to be doing much of anything except remaining quietly rich.

Returning to Europe, via North America, I was struck by the number of people I knew who were now also working in large or small ways off-the-books. It had become an acceptable fact of life.

It took a while, and some thought, for the really disturbing implications of all this to sink in.

Letters
Letter from Mawere
Update
Briefly
Endpiece: by Ashok Mitra
Reviews: including the NI classic
Country profile: Oman

COVER ILLUSTRATION: Hector Cattolicca
ONLINE MAG MAINTAINED BY SIMON LOFFLER