Confidence Intervals for the Underground Economy in Australia

Economists have proposed several different techniques for measuring the underground economy but the literature gives only point estimates not standard errors. This makes it difficult to see if different estimates are contained in one confidence band. This paper provides an approach to estimating confidence intervals for estimates of illicit economic behaviour. The approach is adaptable to existing econometric techniques and is likely to offer a better way to access the reliability of point estimates of the underground economy than subjective opinion.