The current focus of state authorities is still heavily upon “deterring” undeclared work using measures that improve the probability of detection and the penalties imposed on those caught. However, this only deals with undeclared work once it has occurred. It is also important to prevent...

At the Plenary meeting on 25 October 2019, the Platform decided to set up a working group on 'Holistic approaches to tackling undeclared work and developing national strategies'.The specific focus for this working group – as per activity 5 of the Platform's work programme 2019-2020 – is as...

In transition economies, a significant number of companies reduce their tax and social contributions by paying their staff an official salary, described in a registered formal employment agreement, and an extra, undeclared "envelope wage," via a verbal unwritten agreement. The consequences...

High tax rates have led to shadow economy worth over £150 billion in UKSummary:Measurement of the shadow economy is notoriously difficult as it requires estimation of economic activity that is deliberately hidden from official transactions. Surveys typically understate the size of the shadow...

We analyze the determinants of household work contracted in the German shadow economy. The German socio-economic household panel, which enumerates casual domestic employment, is used to estimate the demand for such household work. The regressors include regional wage rates, household income and...

The objectives of this report are: to review the elements of an effective education and awareness raising campaign on undeclared work; to set out a proposal for an education and awareness raising campaign on undeclared work in the Western Balkans, and to provide good practice examples of...

Purpose: This paper tries to identify the wage gap between informal and formal workers and tests for the two-tier structure of the informal labour market in Poland. Design/methodology/approach: I employ the propensity score matching (PSM) technique and use data from the Polish Labour Force...

While there is general agreement that regulatory avoidance is an important part of firms' decisions to produce in the informal sector, there is much less agreement on how regulation and enforcement affect firms' decisions on, inter alia, which sector they locate in, their employment decisions,...

Using a special module of the 2015 Mexican Labour Force Survey with information on workers' preferences for jobs with social security coverage, I estimate that 80 per cent of informal workers in large urban areas would prefer to work in a job that provides them with such coverage. The estimation...