Gender, Micro-Entrepreneurship, and the Informal Economy

It is worth emphasizing that the reasons for waiting until the second chapter to tackle the key concepts of the book are twofold. On the one hand, the key concepts needed contextualization within development literature, to which yet another set of theories about social capital/network, social economy, and microfinance had to be introduced. The latter tends to sit on the margins of development research and literature, as we already have discussed. The two main topics of this book, microenterprise/micro-entrepreneurship and the informal sector in the context of developing countries, are closely tied and cannot be separated easily. The issue naturally becomes more complicated when it is related to countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, where the concept of gender and the informal sector, as well as micro-entrepreneurship, remains a severely underresearched area (in contrast with areas such South Asia and Latin America). To bring such a rich literature—which tends to focus on countries and regions other than MENA—to Iran has required significant background work to make sure that readers unfamiliar with the literature arrive at the entry point from which the research for this book departed. If the transition is smooth and insightful, then the effort has been successful.