Doctoral Dissertation Research: Factors Influencing Informal Market Sector Emergence

该项目调查了哪些变量促成了新的非正式经济部门的出现，以及这些部门对贸易和交换的社会经济影响。在世界上许多国家，工业劳动力和正式的有偿就业都在减少，与此同时，国家支持的社会保障也在萎缩。取而代之的是非正式的、不稳定的和临时的谋生方式。在世界许多地方，这种安排预示着未来的经济，种族、宗教和亲属关系将在社会经济稳定和资源获取方面发挥更重要的作用。该项目对研究生进行以经验为基础的科学研究方法的培训，探讨有助于新非正规部门出现和持久的因素。该项目对分析研究严重不足的经济区的市场行为具有重要意义，在这些经济区，目前的经济政策往往无法解释强劲但无法量化的“非正式”部门。Grace Zhou将在斯坦福大学的Sylvia Yanagisako博士的指导下，探讨私有化和自由化在经济领域的不平等所带来的影响，这往往会产生意想不到的团结，从而有能力挑战现有的等级制度。在后苏联时代的中亚，非正规经济的出现和主导地位最为明显，苏联的发展型国家在退出后几乎没有留下就业机会和政府支持。这项研究将在吉尔吉斯斯坦的奥什进行，这是中国和俄罗斯之间的一个主要贸易城市，在那里，非正式市场在经济、社会和自然景观中日益突出，已成为低效国家的象征。由于公众对国家机构缺乏信任，越来越依赖于市场不平衡的分配功能，边缘化社区正在为资源和服务的分配开辟其他途径。研究方法包括访谈、参与观察和非正式部门个人社会网络分析。通过对该地区一个重要市场中心的边缘群体进行研究，该项目将揭示动荡的全球经济中产生的重要新群体。探索基于不断增长的本土第三产业的生计，对公众理解经济创造力、社会流动性和异质人群之间的人际交流具有更广泛的意义。

This project investigates what variables contribute to the emergence and new informal economic sectors, and what socioeconomic impacts these sectors have on trade and exchange. Industrial labor and formal, waged employment has declined in many countries across the world, accompanied by the shrinking of state-sponsored social security. Informal, precarious, and temporary modes of making a living have risen in their place. In many parts of the world, this arrangement is a harbinger of an economic future where ethnic, religious, and kinship relations figure more prominently in socioeconomic stability and access to resources. This project, which trains a graduate student in methods of conducting empirically-grounded scientific research, explores the factors that contribute to the emergence and durability of new informal sectors. The project has important implications for analyzing market behavior in critically understudied economic zones, where current economic policies are often unable to account for robust, yet unquantifiable "informal" sectors. Grace Zhou, under the supervision of Dr. Sylvia Yanagisako of Stanford University, will explore the implications of inequalities of privatization and liberalization in the economic sphere, which often produce unexpected solidarities that have the power to challenge existing hierarchies. Nowhere is the emergence and dominance of informal economies more apparent than in post-Soviet Central Asia, where the Soviet developmental state left behind few employment and government supports after its retreat. The research will take place in Osh, Kyrgyzstan, a major trading city between China and Russia, where the growing prominence of informal markets in the economic, social and physical landscape has become a symbol of the ineffective state. With little public trust in state institutions, amidst increasing dependence on the market's uneven distributive functions, marginalized communities are forging alternative routes for the distribution of resources and services. Research methods include interviews, participant observation, and social network analysis of individuals working in the informal sector. In conducting research on marginal groups in a key market hub of the region, this project will shed light on important new formations arising out of a tumultuous global economy. Exploring livelihoods that are based on a growing, vernacular tertiary sector has broader implications for public understandings of economic ingenuity, social mobility, and interpersonal exchange between heterogeneous groups of people.