The category informal retailers refer in general to those people who are engaged in various activities, such as the supply of goods or services on streets, sidewalks and other public spaces, which make up the area in which they are and perform informal work. However, there are three different types of people dedicated to informal sales that may be affected by the measures, policies or programs aimed at recovering the public space occupied by them, namely: a) stationary informal retailers, which they are installed together with the goods, implements and merchandise that apply to their work in a fixed way in a certain segment of the public space, excluding the use and enjoyment of the same by other people permanently, so that the occupation of the space subsists even in the hours in which the seller is absent from the place; b) sellers or semi-stationary informal sellers, who do not permanently occupy a certain area of ??public space, but nonetheless, due to the characteristics of the goods they use in their work and the merchandise they sell, must necessarily occupy transitory form a certain segment of the public space, such as people who sell hot dogs and hamburgers, or who push fruit or grocery cars through the streets; and c) informal retailers, who, without occupying public space as such, carry with them - that is, physically carrying - the goods and merchandise that apply to their work, do not obstruct the transit of people and vehicles beyond their personal physical presence.
Published in Chapter:
Tool for the Financial Inclusion of Informal Retailers in Colombia
Gustavo Adolfo Diaz (Universidad Santo Tomás, Colombia), Olga Marina García Norato (Universidad Santo Tomás, Colombia), Alvaro Andrés Vernazza Páez (Universidad Santo Tomás, Colombia), and Oscar A. Arcos Palma (Universidad Santo Tomás, Colombia)
Copyright: © 2020
|Pages: 21
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-7998-2440-4.ch010
Abstract
One of the structural problems in Colombia is the informality of economic activities. Indeed, there is a high proportion of informal retailers in large cities of the country. This chapter propounds a tool, Credit Scoring, for the financial inclusion of this population. The tool is designed for obtaining resources at lower financial costs, and it aims at improving the commercial activities of these agents. In this way, informal financing, which increases poverty, is avoided. Also, in connection with this subject, surveys conducted among a thousand informal retailers in five Colombian cities—Bogotá, Cúcuta, Ibagué, Villavicencio and Arauca—were taken into account.