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China+Neglected+Informal+Economy http://mcx.sagepub.com Modern China DOI: 10.1177/0097700409333158 2009; 35; 405 Modern China Philip C. C. Huang China's Neglected Informal Economy: Reality and Theory http://mcx.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/35/4/405 The online version of this art...

China+Neglected+Informal+Economy
http://mcx.sagepub.com Modern China DOI: 10.1177/0097700409333158 2009; 35; 405 Modern China Philip C. C. Huang China's Neglected Informal Economy: Reality and Theory http://mcx.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/35/4/405 The online version of this article can be found at: Published by: http://www.sagepublications.com can be found at:Modern China Additional services and information for http://mcx.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Email Alerts: http://mcx.sagepub.com/subscriptions Subscriptions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.navReprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.navPermissions: http://mcx.sagepub.com/cgi/content/refs/35/4/405 Citations at UNIV MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST on July 9, 2010 http://mcx.sagepub.comDownloaded from 405 Author’s Note: My thanks to Kathryn Bernhardt, Christopher Isett, Yusheng Peng, Fangchun Li, Yu Shengfeng, Xia Mingfang, and two referees for their helpful comments on the Chinese and English versions of this article. Modern China Volume 35 Number 4 July 2009 405-438 © 2009 SagE Publications 10.1177/0097700409333158 http://mc.sagepub.com hosted at http://online.sagepub.com China’s Neglected Informal Economy Reality and Theory Philip C. C. Huang People’s University of China University of California, Los Angeles The informal economy—defined as workers who have no security of employment, receive few or no benefits, and are often unprotected by labor laws—in China today accounts for 168 million of the 283 million urban employed, but the official statistical apparatus in China still does not gather systematic data on the informal economy. Part of the reason for the neglect is the misleading influence of mainstream economic and sociological theo- ries, which have come from the “economic dualism,” “three-sector hypoth- esis,” and “olive-shaped” social structure theories that held great influence in the United States in the 1960s. This article reviews the core elements of that modernization model, the “revolution” in development economics that fol- lowed in the 1970s and 1980s, and the “counterrevolution” from neoclassical economics that came with the rising ideological tide of neoconservatism. The article argues for a balanced theoretical perspective that can more appropri- ately capture the realities of the informal economy today. Keywords: statistical data; economic dualism; informal economy; develop- ment economics; neoclassical economics; social justice The “informal economy” has grown dramatically worldwide in develop-ing countries since the 1970s, a phenomenon highlighted by agencies like the International Labor Organization (ILO) of the United Nations, the “Social Protection Unit” of the World Bank, and the Nobel Peace Prize selection committees. China, with marketization of its economy, has become part and parcel of this worldwide phenomenon in reality, even while its state statistical apparatus continues to neglect the informal sector. This article examines the available empirical evidence and analyzes how the at UNIV MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST on July 9, 2010 http://mcx.sagepub.comDownloaded from 406 Modern China same phenomenon has been differently understood by opposing economic theories. It calls for setting ideological excesses aside to bring out genuine insights, and joining those together to form a balanced theoretical perspective. China’s Informal Economy The informal economy has become the largest sector of nonagricultural employment in developing countries and has drawn greater and greater attention from development economists. In “asia,”1 it has grown to about 65 percent of the total nonagricultural employment (and 48 percent in North africa, 51 percent in Latin america, and 78 percent in Sub-Saharan africa), according to the authoritative study by the ILO (2002). Even though the ILO has yet to take China into full account (in part because of want of data), this phenomenon has become undeniable in China of the marketizing reform era, even by its own sparse official data: in 1978, there were only an insignificant 15,000 employees outside the formal sector; by 2006, that figure had exploded to 168 million, out of a total urban labor force of 283 million, to make up 59.4 percent of the total (Zhongguo tongji nianjian, 2007: 128-29, Table 5-2; cf. Hu angang and Zhao Li, 2006). The proportion occupied by the informal economy continues to expand in China and throughout the developing world, a fact that has been underscored by numerous studies, including those of the Social Protection Unit of the World Bank (see, as examples, Blunch, Canagarajah, and Raju, 2001; Canagarajah and Sethuraman, 2001; and Das, 2003). The ILO, first established under the League of Nations in 1919 and awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1969 for its championing of social justice for laborers, defines the informal economy and its workers sensibly and practically: as workers who have no security of employment, receive few or no benefits, and are often unprotected by state labor laws.2 For China, the best example would be the 120 million-odd nongmingong (peasant-workers) employed in the cities and towns, “leaving both the land and the home vil- lage” (litu lixiang), and another 80 million locally employed, who “leave the land but not the village” (litu bu lixiang).3 The great majority of these 200 million nongmingong do not enjoy official urban resident status and take the hardest, dirtiest, and lowest-paid work shunned by urban workers. They work both in the formal economy as temporary, low-paid workers without benefits and outside the formal economy in small, so-called private enterprises (siying qiye, 私营企业; more below),4 or as self-employed getihu (个体户), or simply as unregistered laborers in a great variety of pursuits (more below). Indeed, the ILO, which had focused in the 1970s and 1980s at UNIV MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST on July 9, 2010 http://mcx.sagepub.comDownloaded from Huang / China’s Neglected Informal Economy 407 on an “informal sector” conceptualized as separate from and outside of the formal sector, has since emphasized the need to include workers who are employed in the formal sector on an irregular basis. It has accordingly revised the informal-sector concept into a broader one, the informal econ- omy, to take account of both those working informally inside the formal sector and those working outside the formal sector (ILO, 2002). Statistical data for China’s informal economy are still relatively unde- veloped, unlike for countries like India, Mexico, and South africa, whose governments have worked together with the ILO to reorient their statistical categories and procedures to take full account of the informal economy.5 For China, the best way to obtain an overview approximation of the infor- mal economy is to start with the National Bureau of Statistics’ (NBS) figure for the total of urban employed persons (chengzhen jiuye renyuan, 城镇就业 人员), which is based on the reliable 2000 population census that included rural migrants who worked in the cities for more than six months a year, and deduct from it the numbers of regular employees in the officially reg- istered and counted formal entities reported annually through the enter- prises to arrive at the number of employees in the urban informal economy.6 Thus, for 2006, we start with the NBS’s count of 283.1 million total urban employed persons, deduct the 114.9 million persons who are employed on a regular basis (i.e., the zhigong, 职工, or regular staff and workers) in dif- ferent kinds of formal enterprises according to the categories used by the NBS (i.e., “state-owned units” [guoyou danwei, 国有单位]; “collective units” [jiti danwei, 集体单位]; “cooperative units” [gufen hezuo danwei, 股份合 作单位]; “joint ownership units” [lianying danwei, 联营单位]; “limited liabil- ity corporations” [youxian zeren gongsi, 有限责任公司]; “share-holding cor- porations limited” [gufen youxian gongsi, 股份有限公司]; those “with funds from Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan” [Gang Ao Tai shang touzi danwei, 港澳台商投资单位]; and “foreign funded units” [waishang touzi danwei, 外商 投资单位]; Zhongguo tongji nianjian, 2007: 138, Table 5-7), and arrive at the figure of 168.2 million employees in the urban informal economy, both registered (as so-called private enterprises and self-employed getihu) and unregistered, as shown in Table 1. Most of the 168.2 million employees of the urban informal economy come from the 120 million-odd nongmingong working in the cities, for which our best source is the authoritative “Summary Report on China’s Nongmingong Problem” (“Zhongguo nongmingong wenti yanjiu zongbaogao,” 2006), com- piled at the instruction of Premier Wen Jiabao and under the leadership of the Research Office of the State Council, with the collaboration of a host of government units and scholars, and based on the systematic samp- ling of 68,000 households from 7,000 villages in thirty-one provinces at UNIV MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST on July 9, 2010 http://mcx.sagepub.comDownloaded from 408 Modern China (and municipalities and regions).7 according to that report, 30.3 percent (or 36.4 million) of the 120 million work in manufacturing and another 22.9 percent (or 27.5 million) in construction, making for a total of about 64 million nongmingong who work in the urban “secondary industry.” In addition, a total of about 56 million nongmingong work in the urban “tertiary industry,” that is, services, including 10.4 percent, or 12.5 million, in “social services,” such as domestics, guards of residential compounds, barber shop and massage parlor personnel, delivery persons, garbage collectors, street cleaners, and so on; 6.7 percent, or 8 million, mainly service personnel in hotels or hostels and eateries; 4.6 percent, or 5.5 million, in wholesale and retail trade, mainly small shops, stalls, and vendors; and so on. These nongmingong are second-class citizens who do not have regular urban resident status. They are generally low paid and work for few or no benefits. according to the “Summary Report,” the average annual wage of these peasant-workers in 2004 was 780 yuan a month, and the average number of hours worked was eleven a day. In other words, while working nearly 50 percent more time than regular urban laborers, they received an average of just 60 percent of the pay. among them, just 12.5 percent worked with some kind of a contract. Only about 10 percent had medical insurance, and only 15 percent had retirement benefits.8 Many worked in small informal enterprises or else were self-employed, with no protection from labor laws or state-organized labor unions. Without urban resident status, many had to bear the added burden of no health benefits and special school fees for their children. From their ranks came the great majority of the 700,000 odd laborers crippled that year by accidents at work. These basic facts are confirmed by a host of other smaller-scale studies.9 They are also confirmed in the main, if not in all particulars, by the third of three systematic international income surveys carried out for the years Table 1 Urban Employment by Registration Status, 2006 Registration Status Number Employed (in millions) % Employed persons 283.1 100 Formal workers and staff 114.9 40.6 Informal workers Private enterprises 39.5 14 Self-employed 30.1 10.6 Not formally counted 98.6 34.8 Source: Zhongguo tongji nianjian (2007: 128-29, Table 5-2), Zhongguo laodong tongji nian- jian (2007: 13, Table 1-8). at UNIV MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST on July 9, 2010 http://mcx.sagepub.comDownloaded from Huang / China’s Neglected Informal Economy 409 1988, 1995, and 2002, involving collaboration between scholars from abroad and those of the Chinese academy of Social Sciences, called the Chinese Household Income Project. Those surveys took a subsample of the NBS household survey, using modified criteria intended to overcome some of the limitations of the NBS survey.10 For 2002, the survey covered a sample of 9,200 rural households in 120 counties and 6,835 registered urban households in seventy cities and included a subsample of rural migrants living in urban areas. That survey found that that migrants earned on average 50 percent less than urban residents,11 even without taking into account differences in number of hours worked or differential access to health services and education (gustafsson, Li, and Sicular, 2008: 12, 29; Khan and Riskin, 2008: 76). In addition to the 120 million nongmingong, there are about 50 million regular urban residents who work in the informal economy, as shown in Table 2. Many of those are disemployed (xiagang, 下岗) workers who had lost their previous jobs in state-owned or collective enterprises and who now work mainly in the tertiary industry of services. Solid and comprehen- sive data are lacking, but to judge by a fairly systematic sampling of the disemployed workers of fifty-five cities in seventeen provinces done in 1997 at the height of the xiagang phenomenon, the majority were “middle- aged” (64 percent ages 30 to 50) and of relatively low educational back- ground (56 percent with only a grammar school or lower-middle school education; only 5.7 percent had received a higher education in universities or technical colleges). The majority ended up working in the informal ser- vice sector in transport and trade, eateries, social services, and the like; in small so-called private enterprises; as self-employed individuals; or in the kinds of jobs that are just one rung above those taken by the nongmingong. Only a small proportion of those surveyed (4.7 percent) believed they had “benefited greatly” from the government’s program to retrain and place disemployed workers (“Chengzhen qiye xiagang zhigong” ketizu, 1997; see also Ministry of Labor and Social Security, [2002] n.d.). In terms of registration status by ownership form, the 168.2 million laborers of the urban informal economy include a total of 69.6 million who are officially registered, of whom 39.5 million work in registered so-called private enterprises and another 30.1 million as registered self-employed. as already noted, 98.6 million are simply not registered (with the State administration for Industry and Commerce; see Table 1). The so-called private enterprises are officially defined as enterprises owned by “natural persons” (ziranren, 自然人). They therefore do not include “limited liability corporations” or “share-holding corporations lim- ited” that have corporate “legal person” (faren, 法人) status; enterprises at UNIV MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST on July 9, 2010 http://mcx.sagepub.comDownloaded from 410 Modern China “with funds from overseas Chinese in Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan”; or “foreign funded enterprises,” all of which may be considered “capitalist” (and, of course, also not those registered as state-owned, “collective,” or cooperative enterprises). They must therefore not be confused with what the term private enterprises would suggest in the american context, that is, all nongovernment enterprises. These Chinese “natural persons-owned” private enterprises in fact account for just 14 percent of all urban employed persons and should definitely not be equated in any sense with the whole or the predominant part of Chinese “capitalism” (Zhongguo tongji nianjian, 2007: 128, Table 5-2). They are almost all small businesses. In 2006, there were a total of 5 million such entities registered, of which those registered in the cities and towns employed a total of 39.5 million workers (and those registered in “rural” areas, 26.3 million), making for an average of 13 workers per enter- prise (Zhongguo tongji nianjian, 2007: 150, Table 5-13).12 according to the sixth systematic sampling survey of these enterprises done (once every two or three years since 1993) in 2005, with questionnaires completed by one per thousand of these units throughout the country, just 1.13 percent of the enter- prises were larger entities that employed over 100 workers.13 The great majority were small-scale enterprises averaging, we have seen, just 13 workers per enterprise. The largest proportions were in manufacturing (38.2 percent), shops and eateries (24 percent), social services (11.1 percent), and construction (9.1 percent). Workers in such informal units generally enjoy little in the way of benefits or job security or labor law protection (“Zhongguo siying qiye yanjiu” ketizu, 2005). To be sure, the “employed persons” of these 5 million small private enter- prises include their owners, who might be considered small-scale private Table 2 Urban Employment by Registration Status and Nongmingong versus Urban Residents (in millions) Registration Status Number Employed Total 283.1 Formal 114.9 Informal 168.2 Nongmingong 120 Urban residents 48.2 Source: Zhongguo tongji nianjian (2007: 128-29, Table 5-2); cf. “Zhongguo nongmingong wenti yanjiu zongbaogao” (2006). at UNIV MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST on July 9, 2010 http://mcx.sagepub.comDownloaded from Huang / China’s Neglected Informal Economy 411 capitalists, as well as a small number of highly skilled and well-paid indi- viduals. But the great majority of the 39.5 million persons included in the category are common employees working for less favorable terms than those in the formal economy. as for the 30.1 million listed as urban self-employed getihu, they, together with another 21.5 million “rural”-registered getihu, worked in a total of 26 million such entities nationwide in 2006, to make up an average of 1.9 employed persons per entity—generally the person registered, often working with a relative or friend or two (Zhongguo tongji nianjian, 2007: 151, Table 5-14). These “self-employed” persons include small-shop and stall owners, old- and new-style artisans and apprentices, proprietors of small eateries and food stalls, repair shop owners, and the like. Employment in such entities, of course, generally does not come with benefits or job security. Finally, there are the nearly 100 million unregistered urban informal employees. They operate at even lower levels with still less job security, many of them temporary help, such as domestics, home-based workers (like seamstresses and laundresses), delivery boys/girls, apprentices, street vendors, and the like. Together the three main groups of the informal economy (private enterprises, the self-employed, and the unregistered) add up to a composite picture of low pay, little job security, few or no benefits, and no protection under state labor laws—that is, our definition of the major characteristics of the informal economy. These 170 million urban informally employed persons may be seen as at the level, or just a rung above, the 80 million peasant-workers who are locally employed in rural, nonagricultural informal units, including indi- viduals working in the “township and village” industries (the secondary industry) and sundry services (the tertiary industry), especially transport (such as people hauling goods by truck, small tractor, pedicab, bicycle, or animal or human power) and trade (owners of small shops or stalls, itiner- ant vendors), and social services (traditional and semimodern and modern artisans, barbers, repairmen, and so on). These 80 million, of course, qualify fully as a part of the informal economy by our definition.14 Outside of the above, there are just under 300 million persons engaged mainly in “agriculture” (in the broad sense to include forestry, husbandry, and fishing and not exclusive of periodic involvement in commercial activi- ties, as the NBS explains; Zhongguo tongji nianjian, 2007: 463, Table 13-4). These peasants may of course also be counted among those in the informal economy, according to our definition, for they enjoy few b
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