ABSTRACT
Largely overlooked in the literature, however, is the role of “informal” RE brokers working in RE markets in Africa where there are high information costs. While there is a large literature on formal brokers and brokerage services in the advanced and industrialised countries such as the UK and USA where agents or brokers are typically registered with the government, even if they are not members of professional bodies that issue licenses (Antoniades, 2013), in Africa – where registered RE brokers exist, but alongside informal ones – there is scant research to ascertain the claim of the new institutional economists. It is not that there is no research on informality. On the contrary, Africa is one of the birthplaces, if not the birthplace, for conceptual and empirical advances about informality intensifying in the 1960s and 1970s (Meagher, 2007) during which Hart’s (1973) pioneering paper on the concept was born. Rather, even in the famed Hart paper, it is non-RE brokerage activities that receive attention. Since then there has been a vast and growing literature on informal economy in this region, culminating among others in a special issue on “informal institutions and development in Africa” published in “Africa Spectrum” and edited by Meagher (2007), who has written widely on informality in Nigeria since editing the special issue (see, for example, Meagher, 2009, 2011).
