Purpose: The aim of this paper is to evaluate contrasting ways of tackling self-employment in the informal sector. Conventionally, the participation of the self-employed in the informal sector has been viewed as a rational economic decision taken when the expected benefits outweigh the costs,...

In recent years, it has been increasingly recognised that governments seeking to tackle undeclared work effectively should adopt a holistic approach. This seeks to coordinate strategy across the fields of labour, tax and social security law, and to use the full range of policy measures...

Over the past decade or so, there has been widespread recognition that a large and growing proportion of the global workforce is employed in informal sector enterprises. To explain this, neo-liberals contend that enterprises operate in the informal sector due to high taxes, public sector...

To evaluate the prevalence in Eastern Europe of a little discussed illegitimate wage practice in which employers pay their formal employees both a declared wage and an undeclared ‘envelope wage’, an extensive survey involving 10,671 face-to-face interviews in eleven post-socialist societies...

Those engaging in tax non-compliance have been conventionally explained as rational economic actors partaking when the benefits outweigh the costs, and thus public administrations have sought to enforce compliance using a deterrence approach which increases the risk of detection and penalties....

In recent years, participants in the informal economy have started to be viewed less as rational economic actors who engage in the informal economy when the pay-off is greater than the expected cost of being caught and punished, and more as social actors who engage when their tax morale (i.e.,...