I propose the replacement of our current system of individual and corporate income, sales, excise, capital gains, import and export duties, gift and estate taxes with a single comprehensive “revenue neutral” Automated Payment Transaction (APT) tax. The APT tax consists of a flat rate tax...

Frauds can be explained not only in terms of individual willingness to cheat, but may also be driven by opportunities to behave dishonestly. The audit policy should therefore be different for different categories of agents. This paper focuses on the optimal audit policy when there are two...

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...

Our survey of private manufacturing firms finds the size of hidden ‘unofficial’ activity to be much larger in Russia and Ukraine than in Poland, Slovakia and Romania. A comparison of cross-country averages shows that managers in Russia and Ukraine face higher effective tax rates, worse...

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 presents new evidence on the dynamics of dollarization and euroization for twenty-five transition countries. Estimates of the amount of foreign currency in circulation (FCC) in transition countries are used to develop a new comprehensive dollarization index (CDI) and separate indices...

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...

The present paper uses a survey of 1062 Czechs and 524 Slovaks to ask why people evade taxes. We maintain that the Czech and Slovak Republics are “twins” separated at birth and that divergences between these countries since their separation in 1992 can explain divergences in their rates of...

We use a dataset of 1062 individuals from the Czech Republic to forecast the evolution of tax evasion in that country. We ask each respondent how intensely (never, sometimes, often) he evaded taxes in 1995, 1999, and 2000, to calculate probabilities the average individual will move between these...