ABSTRACT

The significance of the informal economy was discovered by the social sciences and development politics in the early seventies in Africa. With the expansion of research there has been a growth of diversity in what has been called the informal economy – and an increasing difficulty of coming to a serviceable definition. This chapter deals with a country praised for a good performance in the period of recent social transformation. It shows some hints of the performance in the accounts of Sik and Tóth: they document an upsurge in the informal economy in the early nineties, similar to the development in all eastern European countries, and a decrease to a comparably low level since the mid-nineties. The chapter illustrates that informal consumption and open markets are particularly common in large settlements, irrespective of the social position of the households.