Namchoke Sasikornwong (PhD Fellow) 

RESEARCH PROJECT

Informality and Innovation: Building Post-Pandemic Resilient Communities in Thailand.

State-Sponsored Domestic Informality: (Non-)Complicity with International Norms.

To better understand informal economy, it is relevant to elevate the study to the international level. At domestic level, a state monopolises the power to prescribe what is formal or informal. At the anarchical international level without a central authority, the definition of power lies in the hands of dominant states, which initiate international laws and norms imposed upon inferior states. Inferior states may not agree with international law and norms and complicitly allow their citizens to deviate from them, hence state-sponsored informal economy. State-sponsored informal economy by a developing state is a result of the combination of various formulas of the logics of consequences and of appropriateness conditioned by path dependency. The informal economy is inextricably related to foreign policy, especially to question of whether a state identifies itself with the West and agrees with the West-led world order, and how it sees its position in international relations in terms of its relative capabilities and its interest in revising, acquiescing in or supporting the status quo.