The Real Mohamed Bouazizi and 'System D'

To eke out a living, poor entrepreneurs like Bouazizi -- not just in Tunisia, but across the world -- have little alternative but to join the local extralegal economy with its own rules for making transactions and protecting assets. Bouazizi, for example, paid 3 dinars a day for the regular use of a location on the street -- what the ILD calls an "extralegal property right." According to our research, he had worked his entire life to establish a small place in the local market economy -- and lost it in a matter of minutes.

During our research we found hundreds of small enterprises like Bouazizi's, run by Tunisians with no legal identity, no legal address, and no legal right to their shack or market stall. Without legal documents, their ability to make the most of their assets is limited, and they live in constant fear of being evicted or harassed by local officials. According to our research, around half of the entire Tunisian workforce is employed by extralegal businesses of this kind. Around the region, the number is far larger -- over 100 million Arabs.

If committing suicide over the loss of $225 worth of goods and a regular location on the street for a fruit stand seems inconceivable to most people in the United States and Europe, Bouazizi's counterparts throughout Tunisia and in the extralegal economies in the rest of the Arab world understood immediately his desperation. In their eyes, Bouazizi had not been just the victim of corruption or even public humiliation, as horrible as they are; he had been deprived of the only thing that stood between him and starvation -- the loss of his place in the only economy available to poor Arabs.