In November 2025, British anthropologist Keith Hart died in Paris. He was 81 years old.
Hart had many interests, but since it was him who introduced the dimension of economic “informality” into development policy debates, my commentary is a tribute to his original contribution, looking back sixty years when a field called “development economics” was still in its formative years.
1965, Ghana: Keith Hart, Ph.D. student of Cambridge University, starts his PhD field research on rural-urban migration. He spends two years, mostly in Accra, and gets ample opportunities to study the economy of poor urban households.
1971, Sussex. Back in the U.K., Hart participates at a development conference on “Urban unemployment in Africa” at the “Institute of Development Studies”. These were times when migration to cities and urban unemployment was a big topic among development economists.
At the conference, Hart delivers a paper on “Urban employment and informal income opportunities”, based on evidence from Ghana – instrumental for the study of the “informal sector”. His aim is essentially to show that the urban poor are not unemployed – to the contrary, they were constantly looking for informal income opportunities.
The importance of this seems evident now, but had remained in the shadow of a then dominant focus on “unemployment”. Hart never conceived of the informal economic activities as a “sector” – like manufacturing or agriculture. He insisted that formal and informal dimensions of an economy always have to be studied together.
Today, “informality” and the informal sphere of the economy are still very present in our debates, most recently after the Covid-19-shocks that caused a drastic reduction of formal employment in many economies.
I have seen two ways, in which the concept is put to work
On the one hand, the informal economy contributes to the livelihoods of the poor – working with the resources at your disposal and responding to the dearth of employment in the formal economy. This dimension absolutely needs to enter into the frameworks of development policies, and indeed it has informed many of those policies over the last decades.
On the other hand, given the lack of regulation, social security, workplace safety in the informal economy, policy-makers often called for regulation, effectively a “formalization” of the informal sphere. This can refer to business permits, taxes, safety at the work place, access to credit, and many other things.
Keith Hart has the last word.
“I had no ambition to coin a concept…I meant my ethnography to persuade development economists to abandon the unemployment model. More was going on in the grassroots economy than they imagined.”
References
Hart, K.
1973. Informal income opportunities and urban employment. Journal of Modern African Studies. Pp. 61–89.
2022. Self in the World. Connecting Life’s Extremes. New York: Berghahn Books. Pp. 98–100.
