Informal Economies and Informal Workers in Global Capitalism

This chapter introduces the aims and purposes of this book, and presents an overview of key dimensions of the challenges and opportunities that were amplified by the social, cultural, economic and political consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic as these continue to shape and echo through the informal economies, and the experiences of informal workers, of Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and the Asia–Pacific (AP). The chapter frames this discussion through an engagement with the ways in which skills, education and training and contested ideas about Lifelong Learning (LLL) are understood as being central to the problem of “informality”, and as the “panacea” to this problem. It also introduces our argument that conceiving of these challenges and opportunities as being structured by a “political economy” of LLL provides a productive avenue by which we can draw on diverse, but critical, theoretical and methodological tools in developing our analysis in the chapters that follow.