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...

A 2002 survey of 1089 Czechs and 501 Slovaks, as well as a more limited survey of Hungary, and Poland, indicates that an individual may evade taxes in part if he believes he is receiving substandard government services. We suggest that an individual’s evaluation of the quality of government...

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...

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...

This paper examines the measurement, size and implications of the Underground Economy in the US.

This paper examines the size and implications of the Underground Economy in the US.

In this paper we propose a model of how institutional benefits, taxation and government regulations affect the productive activity of private enterprises. We consider an environment in which public officials enforcing tax and regulatory obligations are potentially corruptible, and markets for...

A taxonomy of underground economies is elaborated based on the new institutional approach to economic development. Members of formal sectors confront different sets of transformation and transaction costs than do members of informal sectors and these differences are regarded as crucial to the...

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...