Costa Rica has a long-established humanitarian tradition as a country of asylum for refugees fleeing repressive regimes in other South American countries. Salvadorean refugees began arriving in Costa Rica in 1980, and many of them received assistance directed at making them self-sufficient. This work focuses on the urban development programmes funded and implemented by various international and domestic, governmental and non-governmental agencies. Basing her study on extensive field-work with Salvadorean refugees, the author addresses the questions of why some small urban refugee enterprises failed, and how and why others survived and flourished. Basok rejects the theoretical models traditionally used in development studies for analyzing the non-capitalist forms of production in the capitalist economy, arguing that these theoretical models place too much emphasis on external aspects of production. Instead, she proposes that internal aspects such as technology, labour relations, and organization of production need to be examined to allow an understanding of how informal petty commodity producers survive competition with capitalist enterprises.
In her research with members of small urban enterprises - including shoemakers, bakeries, carpentry shops, street vendors, seamstresses and tailors, and market and handicraft shops - she demonstrates that these enterprises can be viable when their production is organized in such a way that they become resistant to competition with the capitalist sector.