New Research on Informal Entrepreneurship: Roma Informal Waste Gathering under Covid-19 Conditions
Tim Gittins, associate professor at the Institute for the Development of Enterprises is planning to conduct innovative research on the topic of Roma informal waste collection and its relationship to the environment and informal entrepreneurship.
Around two thirds of all businesses in the world are not legally registered and 60 percent of the world’s population are informal workers (Williams and Oz-Yalaman, 2021). This activity is mostly conducted in ‘low level’ economic sectors such as informal waste scavenging.
In the CEE region Roma individuals and others tend to work through scavenging municipal waste. A conceptual model has been designed to examine the extent for integration of scavenging into environmental policy through development of a research paradigm applied to Roma and similarly marginalised non-Roma individuals.
Evidence from studies of informal waste collection outside Europe suggests that in some cases it has been integrated into municipal waste management policy. In the CEE region environmental policy insufficiently acknowledges the existence of informal scavenging where waste material categorisation and disposal are not monitored to present the existence of environmental problems.
Research is planned to be conducted with Roma individuals and others in Hungary in 2022 with objectives of assessing:
- Roma informal waste gathering under Covid-19 conditions in relation to income earning activities.
- Prospects for integration of informal entrepreneurship with overall entrepreneurship policy.
Please contact me for further information on tim.gittins@uni-corvinus.hu