The Dark, and Independent, Side of the Italian Labour Market

In many countries the shadow employment has a very high priority among policymakers. A new time series for this component of the labour market has been recently released by the Italian institute of statistics. Taken together they give the motivation and the occasion for a fresh analysis of the Italian labour market over the last two decades. The aim and the contribution of this paper is to highlight some stylised facts about the links between the two sides of the labour market, the dark and the regular. Results from “exhaustive” VAR/VEC models suggest that there are no connections (causal relationships, feedbacks, contemporaneous correlation) between these two time series. In this sense, we could correctly refer to the undeclared work as an “independent” side of the Italian labour market. I interpret these results as providing empirical support for the ineffectiveness of labour policies in converting black employment into regular one.