INVITATION TO PRESENT PAPERS – REVISTA ECONOMÍA 125

Informal Work in the Emerging World Order:  geoplitics, digitilization, and gender

The restructuring of work, deepened during the Covid-19 pandemic, has tended toward the expansion of informal employment, understood as work that takes place outside of labor market regulations. The strong emergence of the so-called “platform economies” has reinforced the prevalence of informal employment, particularly among women, while geopolitical and environmental crisis have begun to reshape global production and trade more broadly with uncertain consequences for the structure of domestic labor markets.

Recent labor outlook reports for Latin America and the Caribbean prepared by the International Labor Organization (ILO) have pointed out the costs of informality and the challenges of implementing employment formalization policies in a context of emergence of artificial intelligence and its incorporation into production processes.

In general, the Covid-19 pandemic evidenced the costs of informality and the weakness of social security systems, renewing the debate around the need to formalize employment and generate quality jobs. In particlar, the accelerated digitilization of the service industry induced by quarentine measures around the globe, produced windfall profits for platform providers, while leaving workers, particularly women that shoulder the additional burden of unpaid care work, exposed to unprecedented economic and health risks at a time where public finance has been stretched to its limit.

In the post-pandemic, informal work and platform work continue to play an important role in the recovery of employment. Recent leaps in artificial intelligence tecnology raise questions about whether persistant informality and unemployment may cease to be particular features of underdeveloped or peripheral economies and become characteristic also of wealthy countries in the capitalist core. The current precariousness of working conditions and the volatility of income creates a series of problems for the social reproduction of the working class and for the financial sustainability of social security systems designed around the notion of permanent full employment.

All of this ocurs also at a time of increasing geopolitical conflict and environmental crises promise to restructure the global economic order built under the neoliberal globalization of the last 40 years with transformative implications for Latin America’s role in global production and trade and for labor demand within the region.

In this context, the journal, Economía of the Universidad Central del Ecuador (UCE), seeks to publish a special issue entitled "Informal Work in the Emerging World Order:  geopolitics, digitization and gender,” to anazlyse these various transformations in the world of work. We seek contributions that adress three seperate questions, in the hopes of synthezising broader perspectives:

First, what implications do increased global geopolitical and economic rivarly have for the production, trade, the future of labor markets in latin america, historically characterized by structural dualism, a persistantly large informal sector, and limited social protection?

Second, how do digitilization and the use of artificial intelligence shape the posibilities for employment formalization in latin america? What is the potential of these technologies to either deepen or reverse existing gaps between informal and formal employment as they reshape how economic value is produced and distributed?

Finally, how do gender relations and the gendered division of labor, both within the household and within workplaces, shape and mediate the processes of economic, labor market, and social security restructuring increasingly induced by technological change and geopolitical crisis?

Contributions from a variety of theoretical and methodological perspectives and different empirical focuses are welcome, including quantitative and qualitative studies, sectoral and country case studies, and comparative analyses.

Dossier coordinator

Gustavo Setreni | FLACSO-Paraguay

Alhelí González Cáceres | FLACSO-Paraguay

Reception of papers

Until November 1, 2024

Submission of papers

Through the OJS platform (it is mandatory to register as an author)

Publication

May 2025

INSTITUTO DE INVESTIGACIONES ECONÓMICAS (IIE) 
FACULTAD DE CIENCIAS ECONÓMICAS │UNIVERSIDAD CENTRAL DEL ECUADOR

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INVITATION TO PRESENT PAPERS – REVISTA ECONOMÍA 124

Keys of Ecuador's economy from the perspective of Economic History

Economic history is a hybrid discipline that analyses the rise, development and fall of economic systems. In this sense, the discipline is concerned with the study of the past and provides a powerful tool for explaining the economic problems of the present, since it provides empirical evidence on real circumstances. Moreover, it is characterised by the fact that it addresses issues from a very long-term perspective, which contributes to understanding the structural transformations of societies.

As it is a hybrid discipline resulting from the crossbreeding of history and economics, the study of the phenomena that attract its attention considers a variety of methodological approaches, from the review of testimonies, records and archives to the application of cutting-edge econometric techniques. For this reason, research in economic history is often balanced between several strands, which gives it an additional strength when it comes to providing interpretations of the events studied.

In recent years, economic history studies have regained vigour in academic discussions following the important contributions of economic historian Ben Bernanke who, together with Douglas Diamond and Philip Dybving, received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2022. Through statistical analysis and research of historical sources, he and his collaborators demonstrated the decisive role played by banks in the global depression of the 1930s. They identified that the Federal Reserve's contractionary monetary policy and its reluctance to act as lender of last resort during the Great Depression exacerbated and prolonged the crisis.

At the local level, however, studies on the economic history of Ecuador are scarce and have made little contribution to academic debates on the rights and wrongs of economic policies, even though the country, as a unit of analysis, can be a particularly interesting case for researchers focusing on the development of small, open economies, specialised as suppliers of raw materials and without their own currency.

Against this background, the Revista Economía of the Universidad Central del Ecuador is preparing a special issue on the Economic History of Ecuador. Through this call for papers we want to broaden the critical discussion on the historical-economic process of our country. To this end, we encourage researchers to submit original articles preferably (but not exclusively) in the following areas:

• Economic growth in the long run
• History of public and private finance
• History of foreign trade
• Industrial and banking business history
• Inequality, poverty and quality of life
• Ecuadorian economic thought

Dossier coordinators

Gonzalo López Paredes | Universidad Complutense de Madrid

Julio Reyna Pérez | Universidad de Barcelona

Reception of papers

Until May 1, 2024

Submission of papers

Through the OJS platform (it is mandatory to register as an author)

Publication

November 2024

INSTITUTO DE INVESTIGACIONES ECONÓMICAS (IIE) 
FACULTAD DE CIENCIAS ECONÓMICAS │UNIVERSIDAD CENTRAL DEL ECUADOR

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