Protecting the entrepreneurial poor: A human rights approach

Abstract

Half of the working poor in developing countries are informal entrepreneurs – they make a living by engaging in commercial activities in the shadow economy. A series of government and market failures – for example, corruption, policy uncertainty, and barriers in access to financial services – limit the productivity of informal businesses and condemn their owners to remain poor. This article offers a normative analysis of this problem and makes a twofold contribution. First, it argues that some institutional obstacles that push the entrepreneurial poor toward informality are a violation of a bundle of rights that we can refer as entrepreneurial rights. Second, it claims that these rights ought to be recognized as legal human rights because of their value to realize individual autonomy and to satisfy the basic need to engage in production.