Socio-Economics Class with Professor Francisco J. “Pancho” Lara Jr.
This was the most thought provoking class I had in the University of the Philippines Diliman and I still can’t believe I got a 1.25. I took this elective for my thesis on Platformization of Labor on TikTok where I reviewed how informal economies survive in mediated spaces amidst algorithmic biases and deregulated transactions online.
Our Socio-economics class had this analysis paper per week when we finish a lecture and this paper is one of my favorites in his class. He asked:
Informal economies are often nested in tradition and social networks and a means to cope and survive in the midst of economic uncertainty and insecurity — such as the recent pandemic. In the context of many
informal medical providers, what problems do they pose and what incentives would you use to regulate these “informal” doctors or informal pharmaceutical producers?
A historical diachronic analysis is required to deconstruct recalcitrant definitions of complex phenomena. In the case of informal economies in developing nations like the Philippines, many of these markets are situated in areas far from regulatory bodies and pertinent institutions like healthcare. Hence, they have limited access to urgent products and services especially needed in times of crises. The inability to reach modern medicine and technologies make many community dwellers in underprivileged far flung areas accept embedded unconventional medical practices. I would argue that it is stereotypical at best to define these informal medical economies as completely bad or life threatening when in history it has frequently been used as the only alternative to expensive medical services and treatments. Yang et al., (2020) highlighted the importance of informal home care givers during the COVID-19 pandemic when hospital bed capacities could hardly accommodate non-COVID-19 related diseases. In places where telemedicine and telehealth services can not reach low signal areas, informal doctors are the usual resort. While there are still primitive medicines that are dangerous and taboo, others were forced to modernize into safer health practices to gradually adapt to what are essentially for the community as well as what could generate more income (Tecson, 1967). Many informal health practitioners realize that providing unsafe services lead to massive backlash online and social ostracizing from communal ties. Same is true in more industrialized places like Hong Kong which had 25% informal healthcare services back in 2020 (Chan et al., 2020). It can then be concluded that while there are dangerous informal healthcare economies, the social actors involved in these practices are capable of learning and more importantly integrating to formal economies when provided opportunities.
In our last discussion we concluded that informal economies are also “hope economies’’ for those who want to earn but have no means to meet bureaucratic conventional franchising. Furthermore, we learned that informal economies reveal access barriers or what is lacking in formal markets. And, we learned from the study of Professor Lara that “informal economies are arenas for legitimacy construction and the creation of inclusive political settlements’’ (Lara, 2023). This is in relation to what we have understood in Bourdiu’s Social Capital Theory and in Alejando Portes’ (2010) book about the systematic inquiry on economic sociology that both explains how material conditions can shift from cultural to symbolic forms.
Group economic outcomes are often pre-determined by established access points to fundamental institutions like healthcare and education. As such, the main problem posed by informal doctors or pharmaceutical producers (eg. dangerous malpractice and the use of infodemic falsities to scam people) will persist when pervasive inequality between material conditions remains unsolved.
To integrate informal health economies to formal markets, Yang et al., (2020) recommended massive push for “health literacy, disease knowledge, psychological readiness, medical care abilities, salary package with special annual leave for care providers, and flexible workplace policies to enable informal home care duties. Their study also emphasized the need for “health outcome monitoring, feasibility evaluation of telemedicine, provision of disease specific advice, home schooling support, and capacity building for care providers to enhance the quality of informal home care (p. 1959). I would add the building of communications structures, implementation of less stringent bureaucratic policies for those who completed health training. A Cooperative should be instituted and its registered members would receive annual bonuses and monthly drugstore gift certificates. The Cooperative will also have progressive registration fees, members will have IDs, access to easy and comprehensible legal frameworks explaining the safety and responsibilities of each member written in multiple languages/dialects. More crucially, the members of the Cooperative will earn health insurance points and monthly rice subsidies.
References:
Chan, E.Y.Y., Gobat, N., Kim, J.H., Newnham, E.A., Hua, Z., Hung, H., Dubois, C., Hung,K.K.C., Wong,
E.L. Y., & Wong, S.Y.S. (2020). Informal home care providers: the forgotten health-care workers
during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Lancet,395(10242), 1957–1959.
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(20)31254-X
Lara, F. Jr. PhD. (2023, April, 22). Socio 118 Week 5-Informal Real Economies Sem2022–2023 Vers2
[Conference Class] University of the Philippines Diliman
Portes, A. (2010). Economic Sociology: A Systematic Inquiry. Princeton University Press. United
Kingdom
Tecson, M.P. (1967). Traditional magic and medicine and the history of modern psychiatry in the
Philippines. (1967). Canadian Psychiatric Associational Journal, 12(2), 223–225.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/070674376701200221
