Development Delusions - Part 9: The Symbiotic Trap - Why Both Sides Need Each Other to Fail
Development Delusions ← Series Home Informality: The $200 Billion Elephant in the Room The development industry, for all its sprawling complexity and vast resources, has a profound and systematic blind spot. It operates almost exclusively within the formal sectors of recipient economies—the registered businesses, legal land markets, and state-defined urban spaces. Yet, an enormous proportion of economic activity and, crucially, the lives of the majority of people in the rest, takes place outside this formal realm, in what is broadly termed the informal sector. David Sims argues that this “elephant in the room” is simply ignored by the industry, despite its implications being “vast and sobering”. This post explores why the formal-sector bias exists and why it matters for understanding development’s limited reach. ...