At the end of 2023, the Arab Institute of Business Manager, the umbrella organization of Tunisian employers, along with UTICA and CONECT, has chosen to tackle the various aspects of the specter of informality by making it the general theme of the 37th edition of Business Days, which it is organizing in Sousse on December 7, 8 and 9 December. The business event is held with the participation of 1,000 economic operators, politicians, experts and administrators from Tunisia and other countries, including former Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo.
The theme of the 2023 Business Days was “Business and Informality: Inequalities and Pending Solutions”.
Focusing on parallel street trading, the informality that afflicts Tunisia, among other emerging and developed countries, is much more complex.
As the academic website Géoconfluences points out in a detailed article on the phenomenon, informality refers to activities or practices that are carried out outside the rules, but depending on the case, this transgressive game can be chosen or forced when the law in force forces some people to resort to it in order to live, work, find accommodation or move around. “The binary and antinomic approach of formal/informal or official/parallel (the former rationalized and subject to taxation, the latter outside state control) is now unanimously refuted. The overlap, interpenetration and even interdependence and complementarity between the two formal/informal economies have been highlighted at the level of practices, actors and sectors.
The many actors that make up the state are the central components of a system of evasion, and state representatives at all levels are not exempt from irregularities themselves, as political and financial scandals have shown. It is the leaders who, in a dynamic approach, define legality (and therefore transgression), while the agents on the ground modulate the application of the rules, alternating between laissez-faire, tolerance, arrangements (for a price) and repression. Smugglers and customs officers are thus complementary figures in a symbiotic system. Rather than an opposition, there is a continuum between formality and informality”.
In fact, in Tunisia today, this is the official thesis defended by the President of the Republic himself.
Widespread informalization
Analysts from a variety of backgrounds, particularly in developed countries, have shown that the transition of emerging economies to market economies, the erosion of the state’s role in social regulation in developed countries, and increased economic and financial liberalization, synonymous with subcontracting, relocation and increased competition, have all contributed to the widespread informalization of economies, with the spread of undeclared work and abusive forms of exploitation.
In this sense, the Geoconfluences article highlighted the fact that white-collar crime and tax evasion scandals (the Clearstream, Petrobras and HSBC affairs, the fight against tax avoidance by large multinationals and Internet giants, etc.) have also challenged the simplistic view of informality as ubiquitous and widespread, presenting it as a stigma of underdevelopment and a sign of the failure of the state.
