While Ukraine was bestowed market economy status by the European Union in 2005 its labour market still endures many structural problems. By exploring the experiences of young graduate employees this article highlights the difficultly in obtaining work within Ukraine's labour market and the problems they face once they have secured employment. Rather than seeing the development of a transparent labour market the collapse of the command economy has seen a relatively closed system develop. The article demonstrates how many jobs are secured through the use of connections or the demanding, and payment, of bribes.The situation does not improve once graduates obtain long-term employment. Interviewees discuss the lack of job security, the informal payment of wages and the lack of legal protection from corrupt employer practices. The article has broader resonance outside of the Ukrainian case study as the discussion of workplace corruption highlights how the issue is concerned with much more than simply cash based transactions and how those that endure it are likely to turn to the informal economy for employment.

Informal employment is conventionally viewed as residual, marginal and sweatshop-like work that impairs urban economic development and social cohesion. Reporting data from 313 interviews conducted with Moscow households during 2005/06, this negative reading is found to apply to just one segment of the informal labour market in this post-socialist city— namely, informal waged employment. Examining the multiple types of informal employment conducted on an own-account basis, more positive impacts emerge of this sphere as the key seedbed for enterprise development and principal mechanism for delivering community self-help. The outcome is a call for a finer-grained understanding and more nuanced policy approach towards informal employment that recognises its plurality of forms and their varying consequences for economic development and social cohesion.

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This article provides a critical evaluation of the competing discourses that variously represent the informal economy as a residue or leftover of some pre-capitalist era, a by-product of a new type of emergent formal economy, an alternative mode of work organization or a complement to the formal economy. Drawing upon evidence from a study of 600 households in Ukraine that unravels the heterogeneous forms of work in the informal economy, the finding is that although each and every representation is wholly valid in relation to specific types of informal work, no one articulation fully captures the diverse nature and multiple meanings of the informal economy. Here, in consequence, it is contended that only by using all of them will a finer-grained and more comprehensive understanding of the complex and multifarious character of the informal economy be achieved. To display how this can be achieved, a conceptual framework is then presented that couples together these contrasting representations in order to provide a more multi-layered and nuanced depiction of the informal economy, followed by a discussion of the implications for urban and regional development and policy of recognizing the multiple and diverse types of informal work. Copyright (c) 2007 The Authors. Journal Compilation (c) 2007 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.