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This paper aims to understand consumption values buying from informal retail markets (i.e., street vendor retailing). It also explores why consumers prefer daily necessary goods from the informal compared to the formal retail market (such as supermarkets, retail chain outlets and e-commerce).

Employing the qualitative research approach, this study collected data from nine respondents in two areas in Malaysia. Data were collected using semi-structured interviews and analysed using the thematic analysis technique. Only representative verbatim codes were presented under five themes of consumption value theory.

Consumers are triggered by the convenience, ease, and exclusive products (conditional value), friendly and known relationship with informal sellers, as well as the availability of some particular food items (emotional value) and lower price and freshness of groceries (functional value) while buying from informal compared to formal retail vendor.

This study provides knowledge implications to the consumption value theory. Functional, emotional, and conditional values are the dominant components of purchase behaviour in informal compared to formal retail channels. Social values are common, whereas epistemic value is more substantial in formal retailing.

Findings are helpful for informal retail businesses to understand consumers' buying behaviour. Informal retail owners should ensure that commodities are fresh, highly affordable and available in the local communities. Building a friendly relationship with consumers would be a key to the success of this retail sector.

Authorities should support informal sellers to set up mobile retail stores in residential areas. This effort would offer greater convenience to both parties in informal businesses and ensure informal sellers' financial and social well-being.

Despite the widespread acceptance of buying goods from informal retail vendors, research on consumption value in informal retailing is largely overlooked. Previous research primarily deals with formal market phenomena due to their size and economic contribution. Consequently, current literature lacks an understanding of why consumers prefer to buy from informal retail vendors for their daily groceries when the formal retail channel could fulfil similar needs. Using a qualitative research design, this research uncovers consumers' buying motives from informal compared to formal vendors.

Despite modern retail formats, for many cultures, informal markets (street markets, farmers’ markets, or wet markets in Asia), fleas, and bazaars still remain an important part of life. The purpose of this paper is to provide further insight into the characteristics of informal retailers, and to explain their growth and longevity in markets.

In order to explore what attracts customers to informal retail markets, a survey conducted on the sample of Croatian consumers was carried out.

The results show that consumers point out fresh, affordable, and healthy products and relationships with vendors as the main advantages, while weather conditions, unattractive food, and crowds are the disadvantages and barriers of purchasing at informal markets.

The results presented give directions for various subjects on how to increase the popularity of informal markets.

This paper addresses consumers’ perception of informal markets in the context of an emerging country. With the literature review, and the results of the explorative survey, it contributes to the knowledge on this type of retailing.

In developing economies, 30% of the gross domestic product on average is undertaken by unregistered businesses. The informal economy leads to high opportunity costs by preventing gains from trade with strangers. To overcome this obstacle, sellers who usually operate in the informal economy should strive to move to formal markets. Current theories are drawn from a view of markets as institutions governed by formal and informal rules. In a nutshell, informal-formal market transitions must be met with a regulative solution. However, the overall results have been disappointing. This failure invites a re-diagnosis of the problem that informal sellers face to act in formal markets and suggesting novel solutions. This paper aims to address this gap.

This is a conceptual paper. The authors adopt MacInnis’s (2011) framework to characterize the approach to theory development.

The authors argue that extant views of formal/informal markets differences address only one of Scott’s (2014) three pillars (regulative, normative and cultural-cognitive). By drawing on Bourdieu’s legacy, the authors propose a cultural-cognitive reading of institutions and suggest it offers a lens to understand the problem as an access challenge, and thus a marketing problem. This perspective allows us to conceptualize informal/formal markets as two distinct institutional fields and argues that all individuals inhabit a particular habitus and contend that moving between markets requires a habitus shift. Thus, acting in formal markets involves bridging a habitus gap. Finally, the authors argue the need for a market-facing intermediary that takes on a market habitus bridging role.

The authors suggest future research efforts could benefit from this new conceptual lens as a means of re-diagnosing other forms of market access that have produced disappointing results.

By looking at differences between formal and informal markets as a habitus gap, the allocation of public funds to support transitions can be better targeted and spent.

The concept of market-facing intermediaries suggests that the beneficiary (e.g. informal seller) and target populations can be different. This insight could catalyze social innovation and trigger novel perspectives to design systemic solutions.

Conceptualizing the formal-informal market transition as a habitus gap suggests new directions to resolve access challenges and a new mediator solution.

The informal economy is more than the inverse of the formalised economy, but is a dynamic environment. It is less limited by legal rules, state control, bureaucracy or tax regulation. On the other hand the informal market is less visible than the regular economy. The purpose of this paper is to find out how informal markets are currently developing.

This contribution is based on a literature review of primarily European work from scholars active in different disciplinary fields, concentrating upon presentations made during the seminars given for the EU Framework 6 CRIMPREV programme. It is structured using a matrix of potentially interesting variables: disciplinary interaction and the need for a multidisciplinary discourse; the position of nation states as a fundamental variable for the existence of the informal economy; general global economic dynamics and their implications for the concept of the informal economy; the interplay of formal, informal and criminal markets; the functionalities of informal markets for the classic survival economy; the dangerousness of wrong perceptions of informal markets and finally the contribution of different methodologies to the knowledge of the informal economy.

The matrix is incomplete and further input is welcome.

This paper could be a start for the comparison of analyses of informal markets in time and space, without the limitations of the classic categories such as organised crime and in limiting definitions.

This paper examines why some sets of people choose an informal way to acquire land. It also examines challenges and drivers within indigenous communities in South-western Nigeria. Policy recommendations were proposed for formalization. What precisely are the contextual reasons that can be established empirically for the prevailing extra-legal practices in the developing land market? What are the challenges, and how can the informal land market be graduated into the formal system?

It begins with identifying the contextual features, drivers and challenges of the informal land market through a combination of literature synthesis and a pilot survey. Subsequently, copies of questionnaires were developed, tested and distributed to the critical actors in the informal land market. Lastly, a structured interview was conducted to elicit possible solutions from key actors (both formal and informal stakeholders). Data were analyzed using descriptive, inferential statistics and computer-aided qualitative data analysis software (CAQDAS, Atlas. ti).

The absence of administrative bureaucracy was the predominant characteristic of the informal urban land market, while household income is the strongest predictor of the informal land market drivers. Informal documentation of transactions is also one of the most severe challenges in the informal urban land market. Consensus between statutory and customary institutions and other 15 governance-related recommendations is proposed to confirm informality to formality.

The paper's outcome will provide a rational guide to landowners, land administrators and other stakeholders on relevant information needed to develop a viable and healthy urban and rural land market.

How do informal lending institutions affect entrepreneurship? This paper aims to investigates the role of formal and informal credit market institutions in the decision to become an entrepreneur over the life cycle.

The author developed a dynamic Roy model in which a decision to become an entrepreneur depends on the access to formal and informal credit markets, nonpecuniary benefits of entrepreneurship, career-specific entry costs, prior work experience, education, unobserved abilities and other labor market opportunities (salaried employment and nonemployment). Using detailed Russian panel microdata (the Russia longitudinal monitoring survey) and estimating a structural model of labor market decisions and borrowing options, the author assesses the impact of the development of informal and formal credit institutions.

The expansion of traditional (formal) credit market institutions positively impacts all workers’ categories, reduces the share of entrepreneurs who borrow from informal sources and incentivizes low-type entrepreneurs to switch to salaried employment. The development of the informal credit market reduces the percentage of high-type entrepreneurs who borrow from formal sources. In the case of default, a higher value of the social network or higher costs of losing social ties demotivate low-type entrepreneurs to borrow from informal sources. The author highlights the practical implications of estimates by evaluating policies designed to promote entrepreneurship, such as subsidies and accessibility regulations in credit market institutions.

This study contributes to the literature in several ways. Unlike other studies that focus on individual characteristics in the selection for self-employment [Humphries (2017), Hincapíe (2020), Gendron-Carrier (2021), Dillon and Stanton (2017)], the paper models labor and borrowing decisions jointly. Previous studies discuss transitions between salaried employment and self-employment, taking into account entrepreneurial earnings, wealth, education and age, but do not consider the availability of financial institutions as a driving factor for the selection into self-employment. To the best of the author’s knowledge, this paper shows for the first time that the transition from salaried employment to self-employment is standard and consistent with changes in access to financial institutions. Another feature of this study is incorporating both types of credit markets – formal and informal. The survey by the European Central Bank on the Access to Finance of Enterprises (2018) shows 18% of small and medium enterprise in EU pointed funds from family or friends. Therefore, the exclusion from consideration of informal credit markets may distort the understanding of the role of the accessibility of credit markets.

Attempts to theorize the relationship between the informal and the illegal sectors of the economy. States that there are significant behavioural similarities. Proposes an emergent paradigm based on dual labour market theory to explain the similarites and differences in order to guide future research in each area. Applies the theory to the production and marketing of crack cocaine and shows how the model helps us to understand issues of exploitation and risk makagement within the drug market.

This study aims to explore how informal pawnbrokers and informal pawners interpret the existence of the informal pawnshop in the traditional market in Surakarta, Indonesia, with the main focus to determine the applicability of informal pawnshop development model.

The research used the qualitative method with the phenomenological approach using interview method to fully comprehend the informants’ views regarding the informal pawnshop existence in traditional markets in Surakarta, Indonesia. The applicability of informal pawnshop development model is required for Muslim market vendors. Charitable institutions shall participate in the development of the model by empowering (zakat, infaq, shadaqah and waqf) funds to help Muslims vendors in the traditional markets for additional capital in accordance with Islamic laws for a pawnshop.

The result of the research shows that the existence of informal pawning in the traditional markets is difficult to avoid as both informal pawnbrokers and informal pawners need one another. Most vendors in the traditional markets are Muslims. Islam teaches that loan interest is categorized as forbidden riba. Meanwhile, in the informal pawning practices, the informal pawnbrokers charge loan interest to the informal pawners.

The objective of this study is to investigate to what extent the Islamic pawn shops motivated the people through interest-free system. However, in past, tradition markets facilitate the people, but they charged a huge against it with interest (riba).

In the last decade, Argentina has experienced a considerable decline in informal employment and wage dispersion. This paper extends a search model with exogenous human capital accumulation to include the informal sector. The model is parametrized to match Argentinian data between 1996 and 1998 – before the onset of the declining trend – and it is used to investigate the contribution of labor market measures to the falling informality, unemployment, and wage dispersion. The findings indicate that institutional factors did not contribute to the positive labor market trends observed; on the contrary, results show that higher severance pay and minimum wages increase informality and that the introduction of unemployment assistance contributed to the spread of informal contracts across the work force. Further, I find that compliance with minimum wage regulation strongly affects the final impact of these policies. While non perfect compliance might reduce unemployment, it reinforces the incentives of workers to move to the informal sector.