Artisans play a very important role in rural areas and especially in support to agriculture. But after the globalization of national economies they are adversely affected by economic policy. Their counterparts in economy are getting benefits from policy which result in evils to artisans. In this scenario, has anybody measured the impact of economic policy on artisan? If so, please disclose. You can also give your opinion in this context.
You can get some lessons from studies on micro-enterprises. In Kenya and other African countries this informal sector was regarded negatively as compared to the modern economy. However in recent years the informal sector known here as jua kali (hot sun) is a source of employment for many young people and there are more attempts to reach it with more favorable public policies.
Thank you Cecil Otieno Agutu for your opinion and sharing experience.
Dear shriKrishna,
This is a time honored problem you are raising. The Physiocratic school raised the problem of dividing society into classes for analyses as you proposed.Attempts were made to put it into input-output form. See the attached article. If you can construct such a table for your problem, then it would be easy to assess impacts. Good Luck
Are we talking about cities artisans of handmade? They are not rural anymore and have less and less in common with tradition usually using ecommerce.
I believe this question will raise very interesting discussions. Until recently the informal sector was seen as peripheral to the formal economy and very little attempt was placed in assessing its major role in employment, output especially for the urban and rural poor, innovation, skill development within the sector and strong linkage with the formal sector both in terms of output and skills transfer. There is a lot that can be said for the role of the informal sector and most of the studies by ILO have tended to focus solely on its role as a major source of employment generation. But I am not certain if any comprehensive work has been done to aggregate the overall contribution to output let alone the impact of policy on the sector. Most of the policy effort to date have tended to seek ways and means of formalizing the informal sector so that it could be influenced by official policies of governments. Many studies in African and Asian countries bear great testimonies to this. There a lot to be said on your question, but would suffice to say that you would probably find only partial studies in selected cities or or rural areas where some effort had been made to capture both the full contribution of the informal sector as well as effectiveness of government policies on a sector that has so much potential in addressing the problem of poverty in many developing countries. And an interesting area for future study would be to assess if there had been any qualitative change or improvement in the informal sector during the 1980/1990 and the sector as we see it in 2000s. Are the jua kalis of the 1980s the same as those of today?
Thank you Alexander Aboagye for your thoughtful comments. Is impact of economic policy on artisans or informal sector measured ?
This is a much more general problem that involves, in addition to crafts, even the traditional services. In the post-industrial era, many crafts, which produce both goods and services, are destined to disappear.
But the Governance may study some countermeasures. For example in the Friuli-Venezia Giulia region (North-eastern of Italy on the borders of Austria, Slovenia and Croatia) the surging of agro-touristic organizations (family farm for Accomodation and Food and drink services) has led to the disappearance of many traditional inns or "osterie". To preserve them the Region has studied how incentivizing their permanence. These traditional Inns or "Osterie" are important people's places of aggregation and are socially relevant in order to maintain population in marginal areas such as the mountain.
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