This paper examines the drivers, and reestimates the size of shadow economies in Europe, with a focus on the emerging economies, and recommends policies to increase formality. The size of shadow economies declined across Europe in recent years but remains significant, especially in Eastern...

The shadow (underground) economy plays a major role in many countries. People evade taxes and regulations by working in the shadow economy or by employing people illegally. On the one hand, this unregulated economic activity can result in reduced tax revenue and public goods and services, lower...

We build a general equilibrium model in which both illegal immigration and the size of the informal sector are endogenously determined. In this framework, we show that indirect policy measures such as tax reduction and detection of informal activities can be used as substitutes for border...

In this paper the main focus lies on the shadow economy and on work in the shadow. The most influential factors on the shadow economy are tax policies and state regulation. The size of the shadow economy was decreasing over 1999 to 2007 from 34.0% to 31.2% for 161 countries (unweighted average)....

A review of the size and nature of the shadow economy and what might be done to tackle it.Reducing tax evasion, the shadow economy and informal employment has been an important policy goal in OECD countries during recent decades. The shadow economy is notoriously difficult to measure, however....

This paper investigates whether the size of the shadow economy increases income inequality in Uganda. This paper applies the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) bounds testing approach to cointegration, to test the long- and short-run relationship between the shadow economy and income...

Using an enhanced MIMIC method, this paper presents new estimates of the Informal Economy (IE) for 110 countries from 1997 to 2022. We address several limitations found in previous estimates of the IE, notably issues surrounding the missing values, time-invariant country characteristics, and...