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...

The size, growth and causes of the US “underground economy” are examined in light of new estimates of foreign holdings of US currency. World dollarization partially resolves the “currency enigma” which refers to the anomaly that roughly 80% of the US currency supply is “missing” and...

This paper examines the available evidence on the size the UK’s underground (unobserved) economy and presents preliminary evidence on the size and growth of the unobserved economy for the period 1960-1980 based on Feige’s transaction approach. Reference: Journal of Economic Affairs, Vol.1...

The aim of this paper is twofold. First, new annual data on Italian irregular sector for the period 1980-1991 are reconstructed. These data are compatible with the available 1992-2001 official data. Second, based on this self-consistent “long” sample a time series analysis of the two sides...

An easy and popular method for measuring the size of the underground economy is to use macro-data such as money demand or electricity demand to infer what the legitimate economy needs, and then to attribute the remaining consumption to the underground economy. Such inferences rely on the...

Recent research on the unobserved economy suggests that the phenomenon has important implications for both macroeconomic policy and public finance. Attention is focused on the public finance implications by examining a macro-model model from which it is possible to derive a family of Laffer...

This paper examines alternative specifications of a general currency ratio (GCR)model used to obtain macroeconomic estimates of the size and growth of the 'underground economy'. Tanzi's approach to estimating the underground economy is shown to be a variation of the GCR model. However both his...

One of the more intractable problems in the area of monetary economics is the measurement of cash payments. Whereas the stock of currency in circulation [C] is well defined and readily measured, the transactions velocity of currency [Vc] (the average number of times currency turns over in any...

The aim of this paper is to analyse the role of uncertainty in shaping the decisions of firms in the underground economy. Following the option value approach, we present a dynamic model which captures (i) the irreversibility of riallocation decisions from the underground sector to the legal...

The two most prominent deadweight losses in public finance are the triangle loss from taxation and the rectangle loss from rent-seeking. This paper suggests that a third type of deadweight loss can rival these two in size and deserves detailed exploration. In the presence of the underground...