Joutia: street vendor entrepreneurship and the informal economy of information and communication technologies in Morocco1

This paper provides an ethnographic and cultural analysis of the ‘informal sector’ in Morocco. In this age of globalisation, no firm can afford to ignore the vibrant informal sector that makes up the bulk of GDP in many developing economies. And yet, the informal sector is routinely misunderstood and mythologised as ‘pimps, drug dealers, counterfeiters and pirates’, and is particularly despised by the high tech industry. Based on fieldwork, the authors' goal is to examine this dynamic economic phenomenon and to dispel a few myths by providing an ethnographic description of one exemplary case. While the study focuses on the experience of an articulate entrepreneur, who happens to operate in the highly dynamic underground economy in new, used and black market information and communications technologies, it speaks to such themes as entrepreneurship, global products flows, economic relations, and the implications of the informal sector for global flows of goods and services.