Formal and informal economies in Guangzhou’s Zhongda cloth market

Abstract

In this chapter particular attention is paid to the way inhabitants and floating workers of the Zhongda Textile Business Cluster organize their everyday lives in this environment and how they make a living. Formal and informal coping strategies are a substantial feature of emerging markets to shoulder the implications of globalization, fierce competition, working conditions, economic, municipal, and political change in a market which is extremely dependent on economic and seasonal fluctuations. Therefore, these coping strategies undergo ups and downs in the market and need to be extremely adaptable to ever-changing conditions. The maturing megacity is striving for gaining control over—or to bring into order—those hard-to-predict markets which have huge momentum. Understanding informal economic and employment mechanisms is a crucial means to explain socioeconomic change affected by dynamics driven by a globalizing world.