Page 62 - Azerbaijan State University of Economics

THE JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC SCIENCES: THEORY AND PRACTICE, V.81, # 2, 2024, pp. 60-83

This law aims to organize the new economic activities and jobs that have emerged in
recent years and are not subject to any legal framework. The law allows for greater
entrepreneurial initiative within a formal framework, facilitating youth access to the
formal labor market through self-employment and, consequently, ensuring social
coverage for as many as possible.

Study objectives
− Clarify the characteristics and intensity of the connection between self-
employment and the informal economy in Algeria.
− Clarify the orientations of Algerian youth regarding freelance work.

− Assess the suitability and capacity of the Algerian Basic Law of the Self-
Employed contractor to encompass freelance work and self-employment. The
study also provides suggestions for potential amendments to attract more
informal jobs within this new legal framework.

LITERATURE REVIEW
There is an intense debate in academic and research circles regarding the notion of the
informal economy, which has sparked wide controversy among scholars from many
regions of the globe. As a result, several terms have emerged, such as the underground
economy, informal economy, gray economy, parallel economy, and shadow economy.
All these terms refer to a specific type of informal economic activity (Schneider,
2022).

The International Labor Organization (ILO) provides a foundational perspective on
the informal economy, emphasizing its pervasive existence across diverse economies
and the pressing need to include informal workers in sustainable development
initiatives (Davidescu, Manta, Geambasu, & Birlan, 2024). The organization
delineates the informal economy as follows:

"The informal economy encompasses all economic activities conducted by people and
business entities that are either legally or practically unregulated or inadequately
regulated by formal frameworks. It flourishes mostly in environments characterized
by elevated unemployment, underemployment, poverty, gender disparity, and
unstable employment conditions." (International Labour Organization, n.d.a. para 1).
Serious publications on the phenomenon of the informal economy first appeared in
the early 1970s, when the focus was primarily on studying the impact of rural labor
migration to cities and the capacity of the urban industrial economy at that time to
absorb this labor force and provide a livelihood for those displaced from their lands
to work far from home (Breman, 2023). Over time, the approach to this phenomenon
evolved, and research topics shifted primarily to its causes, the measurement of its
size, its impact on the formal economy, and efforts to address or mitigate it.

62