ABSTRACT
The previous chapter argued that an early scholarly focus on the magnitude and nature of informal work, emphasizing its organized concentration among lowerpaid workers for profit maximization (the so-called marginalization thesis) and its eventual disappearance with economic development traditionally defined (the socalled modernization thesis), has been increasingly challenged by an alternative conceptualization. This alternative stresses the widespread existence of informal work among demographically diverse populations in various places within relatively developed nations, and its global diffusion facilitated by international investment, migration, and trade (the neo-liberal globalization thesis). In this chapter, we extend this historic conceptual review by looking back to the advent of systematic methodologies for estimating the level and characteristics of informal work and tracing their development to the present.
