The «underground economy» comes to ligth: rural strategies facing the industrialization and urbanization

Abstract

The study of the «underground economy» rises, at the level of the international literature, extreme difficulties under the theoretical and methodological point of view. In this first approach to the subject, the author essentially takes as a start the empirical data collected in the field work done among the rural communities of the Portuguese seashore. The indisputable agitation of the subterranean economic strategies among them seems to be connected with the deep insertion of these communities in the market economy and the recent diffusion, through the rural space, either of the industrialization or of what may be called the urbanization of countryside. By articulating the data of the empirical observation done with the theoretical and methodological reflection available at the international level, the author offers an interpretation of the underground economy that may overpass the fragmentation of the isolated data.