Description:
<jats:p>This article compares some components of the so‐called informal sector in countries of the North and of the South. We establish a parallel between the movements of the popular economy in the South and the social economy (third sector) in the North (Santiago de Chile and Belgium are the respective illustrative cases). Although the institutional contexts differ, we emphasize the similarities in evolution induced by the corresponding modes of regulation. Both the popular economy developing in the large cities of the Third World and the nonprofit organizations emerging in the North are a challenge to dominant modes of regulation, in particular to the ‘state–market synergy’. Both have also given rise to an abundant literature which puts theoretical frameworks, particularly the economist's, into question. Modes of regulation still remain locked into the market/nonmarket dilemma, and this seems to indicate a certain ‘blindness’ to the plurality of modes of organization which are intermeshed in socio‐economic life. We would like to overcome this binary picture and show the fruitfulness of an approach to economics which takes into account a mixture of principles. Such combinations exclude neither the market nor the state, but do not reduce to them. This draws out the contours of a new mode of economic regulation, one which certainly challenges the philosophy of ‘all to the market’, but whose potential is nevertheless rooted in existing economic practices.</jats:p>