Entrepreneurship scholars often lament the lack of economic growth in impoverished informal economies. We propose that this dismal assessment – and subsequent prescriptions to address it – flows from a narrow epistemological approach to informality based on absence, where the lack of (Western) market-supporting legal and regulatory institutions explain missing economic growth at the firm level. In contrast, we build a theoretical approach grounded in presence, proposing that more comprehensive treatment of existing institutions may reveal less visible, individual level types of entrepreneurial growth that occur in informal economies. To do so, we conceptualize informal economies as institutional interfaces built of “bits and pieces” from market and non-market institutions. We propose that the configuration of these interfaces influences the cultural toolkits of inhabitant entrepreneurs, which in turn shapes how they grow in the informal economy. Specifically, we link three dimensions of institutional complexity at the institutional interface (jurisdictional influence, fragmentation, and incompatibility) to three types of growth (direct, dispersed, and disguised) that vary in terms of visibility. Our theory animates understanding of diverse informal economies and entrepreneurship within them – enabling new theoretical development on informal economy variance and culturally informed types of growth.

中文翻译：

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远非虚无：机构如何塑造非正规经济的增长

创业学者经常感叹贫困的非正规经济体缺乏经济增长。我们建议，这种令人沮丧的评估——以及随后解决它的处方——从狭隘的认识论方法转向基于缺席的非正规性，在这种情况下，缺乏（西方）市场支持的法律和监管机构解释了企业层面经济增长的缺失。相比之下，我们建立了一种基于存在的理论方法，建议对现有制度进行更全面的处理可能会揭示出在非正规经济中发生的不太明显的个体层面的创业增长类型。为此，我们将非正规经济概念化为由市场和非市场机构的“点点滴滴”构建的制度接口。我们建议这些界面的配置会影响居民企业家的文化工具包，进而影响他们在非正规经济中的成长方式。具体来说，我们将制度接口处制度复杂性的三个维度（管辖权影响、碎片化和不兼容）与可见度不同的三种增长类型（直接、分散和隐蔽）联系起来。我们的理论激发了对各种非正规经济和其中的企业家精神的理解——促进了关于非正规经济差异和文化知情增长类型的新理论发展。我们将制度接口处制度复杂性的三个维度（管辖权影响、碎片化和不兼容）与可见度不同的三种增长类型（直接、分散和隐蔽）联系起来。我们的理论激发了对各种非正规经济和其中的企业家精神的理解——促进了关于非正规经济差异和文化知情增长类型的新理论发展。我们将制度接口处制度复杂性的三个维度（管辖权影响、碎片化和不兼容）与可见度不同的三种增长类型（直接、分散和隐蔽）联系起来。我们的理论激发了对各种非正规经济和其中的企业家精神的理解——促进了关于非正规经济差异和文化知情增长类型的新理论发展。