Doctoral Dissertation Research: Factors Influencing Informal Market Sector Emergence

这个项目调查了哪些变量导致了新的非正规经济部门的出现，以及这些部门对贸易和交换产生了什么社会经济影响。在世界各地的许多国家，产业工人和正规的带薪就业人数都在下降，同时国家资助的社会保障也在缩水。非正式的、不稳定的和临时性的谋生模式已经取代了他们的位置。在世界许多地区，这一安排预示着经济未来的发展，在那里，种族、宗教和亲属关系在社会经济稳定和获得资源方面发挥着更重要的作用。该项目对研究生进行以经验为基础的科学研究的方法进行培训，探索有助于新的非正规部门出现和持续的因素。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，当前的经济政策往往无法考虑强劲但无法量化的“非正式”部门。在斯坦福大学Sylvia Yanagisako博士的指导下，格蕾丝·周将探索经济领域私有化和自由化不平等的影响，这些不平等往往会产生意想不到的团结，有能力挑战现有的等级制度。在苏联解体后的中亚地区，非正规经济的出现和主导地位最为明显，这个苏联发展中的国家在撤退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，非正规市场在经济、社会和自然景观中日益突出，已成为无效国家的象征。由于公众对国家机构缺乏信任，在日益依赖市场不均衡的分配功能的情况下，被边缘化的社区正在打造资源和服务分配的替代路线。研究方法包括访谈、参与者观察和对在非正规部门工作的个人的社会网络分析。在对该地区一个关键市场中心的边缘群体进行研究时，该项目将揭示动荡的全球经济所产生的重要新结构。探索以不断增长的白话第三产业为基础的生计，对于公众理解经济独创性、社会流动性和不同人群之间的人际交流具有更广泛的影响。

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.