Readings 210-249

Continuing on the characteristics practices of globalization as a project: informalization and recolonization.

• Informalization is a growing culture of informal, or marginal, activity. This kind of activity usually involves people performing casual and unregulated labor, working in cooperative arrangements, street vending, or practicing illegal economics activities. In most cases economists and governments make a distinction between formal economy and its legal connotation and informal sector with its illegal connotation, because the national accounting only measures legal cash transactions. By ignoring informal activity, development policy discounts and marginalizes substantial mechanisms of social reproduction, on which the formal "productive economy" depends.
  

I also find it very interesting how this form of informalization is in fact a way of social exclusion. I found this very interesting video on social exclusion/inclusion that seems relevant to the topic.



It is also important to understand how crucial this informal market is a survival mechanism for the poor. Here is another video that can help us understand how the informal activities affects the lives of poor producers and workers.



I thought this video was very interesting and it relates to all the ideas discussed in the book. This video also made me think about how to improve this peoples lives and give them opportunities to not only survive, but actually transform their informal activities into a legal business. I know in Brazil a huge parcel of the working population earn their living in the informal sector, so the government created programs that makes possible for informal workers to regulate their situation and have their own business. In Brazil is very common for housewives for example to work ate home, they produce cakes, pastries, artisanal stuff and sell to friends and family. So this people can now have their own business, of course that the main idea of this action was to make it easier for this people to legitimize their own business so the process is very easy. I thought this was very interesting , I took a look at the government website and it explains step-by-step how to become a formal microentrepreuner and I think that is definitely a great incentive from the government.

• Global Recolonization poorer states, with borrowed funds earmarked to promote exports to service debt, are unable to subdize sectors and communities on the margins. Like in the Sub-Saharan Africa , whre the total debt servicing amounts to four times the amount spent on health and education. Post colonial states in Africa have generally served as instruments of wealth extraction. Today there is a different form of colonization happening, restoring a colonial division of labor at the expense of coherent national institutions and societies, representing a new form of recolonization. The book also talks about China recolonizing Africa today and how different it is from the "classic colonization" idea from the past. I found this article and it talks about China's actions in Africa and its extraction of resources. I think is really unfair that China is appropriating of all the resources from Africa of course, but like the books says :"Africa is designated as an "extractive resource," via agenda of recolonization." Besides Africa has a history of tribal authorities and ethnic conflicts, which generates a more vulnerable goverment, facilitating the exploitation of resources.