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Zaire The Informal Economy
In Zaire, as in many developing nations, a great deal
of
economic activity takes place outside of the official
economy. Such
activity, variously termed the informal, parallel,
underground,
unrecorded, or second economy, is in many cases so
extensive that
it should not be regarded as marginal or supplemental,
but, rather,
as the way such economies really work. In her study of the
second
economy (her preferred terminology) in Zaire,
anthropologist Janet
MacGaffey concludes that smuggling and other unofficial
activities
constitute the real economy of Zaire. Second-economy
activities are
fully institutionalized and in most respects more rational
and
predictable than official trade and production activities.
The
second economy provides access to goods and services
unavailable in
the official economy and compensates for the deficiencies
of the
official system in infrastructure and services, such as
construction, transportation, distribution networks, and
provision
of capital.
The magnitude of the informal economy far exceeds
official
economic activity. In the early 1990s, Zaire's informal
economy was
estimated to be three times the size of the official GDP.
In Zaire,
as elsewhere, the size of the informal economy reflects
the
increasing inability of the official system to serve the
needs of
the populace. The informal economy has grown dramatically
as
economic and social conditions have deteriorated and as
purchasing
power has dropped. Citizens have increasingly been forced
to turn
to informal economic activity to survive.
The informal economy in Zaire includes a wide array of
economic
activities, similar only in that all are unmeasured,
unrecorded,
and, to varying degrees, illegal in that they are
unlicensed and
designed to avoid government control and taxation. They
range from
small-scale street vending to the production of illicit
goods, to
open and relatively large-scale trading and manufacturing
enterprises, to cross-border smuggling, to barter
arrangements such
as rural-urban exchanges of food for manufactured goods,
to various
schemes intended to avoid the payment of taxes on legal
production
(e.g., concealing legal production and falsifying
invoices).
Despite its significance, however, MacGaffey concludes
that
Zaire's bustling second economy is a mixed blessing. A
cost-benefit
analysis of the second economy provides a varied picture.
On the
plus side, the informal economy in Zaire has enabled the
bulk of
the populace to get by and occasionally to prosper.
Profits from
such activities have been invested in community services
and in
some instances in official economic activity, thus
contributing to
national prosperity. In the social realm, the informal
economy has
empowered women and various segments of the population not
able to
participate in the formal economy
(see
The
Informal Sector;
Polarization
and Prospects for Conflict;
Strategies
of Survival;
The
Status of Women
, ch. 2).
Nevertheless, there are also negative aspects to the
second
economy. Drawbacks include the inherent unfairness and
unevenness
of both access to the resources needed to participate in
the second
economy and the distribution of benefits from such
participation.
Those already rich and powerful and the employed tend to
benefit
far more than the unemployed, the urban poor, or rural
producers.
There are also negative effects on the official economy in
that the
state is deprived of both revenue and foreign exchange
(for
example, smuggling out food crops because of price
controls in
Zaire forces Zaire to use scarce foreign exchange to buy
imported
food), and labor shortages may also result from the
proliferation
of unofficial economic activity.
On balance, although the second economy is dynamic and
contributes to the well-being of most of the Zairian
populace,
long-term economic development and national prosperity
depend on
reforming and energizing the formal economy, transferring
to it the
dynamism of the second economy. The prospects for such a
radical
transformation, however, appear bleak so long as the
Mobutu regime
remains entrenched in power.
Data as of December 1993
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