By Robert Neuwirth, Foreignpolicy.com, October 28, 2011

[This article is excerpted and adapted from Neuwirth's new book: Stealth of Nations: The Global Rise of the Informal Economy.]

[....] You probably have never heard of System D. Neither had I until I started visiting street markets and unlicensed bazaars around the globe. [....]

It used to be that System D was small -- a handful of market women selling a handful of shriveled carrots to earn a handful of pennies. It was the economy of desperation. But as trade has expanded and globalized, System D has scaled up too. Today, System D is the economy of aspiration. It is where the jobs are. In 2009, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a think tank sponsored by the governments of 30 of the most powerful capitalist countries and dedicated to promoting free-market institutions, concluded that half the workers of the world -- close to 1.8 billion people -- were working in System D: off the books, in jobs that were neither registered nor regulated, getting paid in cash, and, most often, avoiding income taxes.[....]