Twenty-five years on from the collapse of communism in the Eastern Bloc, this book colloquium brings together two authors of publications on the importance in everyday life of the informal economy in a post-Soviet, post-Socialist era. 

In recent years, there has emerged a growing consensus among social scientists that everyday economic transactions — comprising cash-in-hand work, subsistence production, and the use of social networks — have increasingly become subsumed by a more thoroughly regulated formal economy. 

In this podcast, the authors of two recent and forthcoming books challenge this view by bringing to light the thriving, if hidden, informal economies in Russia and Eastern Europe. Dr Nicolette Makovicky and Dr John Round discuss with socio-legal scholars and anthropologists the complex relationships between informal and formal work, and show how informal work, often, actually supports more formal income, as people can only afford to undertake low-paid formal work as a result of their informal incomes.