Stealth of Nations

Thousands of Africans head to China each year to buy cell phones auto parts and other products that they will import to their home countries through a clandestine global back channel. Hundreds of Paraguayan merchants smuggle computers electronics and clothing across the border to Brazil. Scores of laid-off San Franciscans working without any licenses use Twitter to sell home-cooked foods. Dozens of major multinationals sell products through unregistered kiosks and street vendors around the world. When we think of the informal economy we tend to think of crime: prostitution gun running drug trafficking. Stealth of Nations opens up this underground realm showing how the worldwide informal economy deals mostly in legal products and is in fact a ten-trillion-dollar industry making it the second-largest economy in the world after that of the United States.