Using the case study of Trinidad and Tobago we investigate for an emerging economy the socioeconomic, demographic, and attitudinal characteristics that influence the propensity of individuals in the household sector to participate in the hidden economy and their perception of the risk of...

The literature on public employment policies such as the job guarantee (JG) and the employer of last resort (ELR) often emphasizes their macroeconomic stabilization effects. But carefully designed and implemented policies like these can also have profound social transformative effects. In...

This paper discusses the estimation of a social accounting matrix that distinguishes between formal and informal activities for China and India for 2000 and 1998-99 respectively. Wage shares for the formal/informal employment for China and net domestic product shares for the formal/informal...

This paper explores macroeconomic policies that can sustain structural change in China and India. A two-sector open-economy model with endogenous productivity growth, demand driven output and income distribution as an important determinant of economic activity is calibrated to a 2000 SAM for...

This paper studies the impact of informality on the long-run relationship between inflation and unemployment in developing economies. I present a dynamic general equilibrium model with informality in both labor and goods markets and where money and credit coexist. An increase in inflation...

This paper estimates the unrecorded economic activity and employment in Macedonia during 1998-2013. We model the unrecorded economic activity as an unobserved process that depends on tax "burden", business regulations and quality of governance, and affects cash in circulation, foreign currency...

The demonetisation exercise announced by the PM on November 8, 2016, aimed to tackle the problems of black money, fake currency, corruption, and terror funding. With time, more targets were added such as the creation of a cashless economy, curbing real estate prices, and broadening the taxpayer...

This paper introduces a comprehensive database of informal economic activity. The database focuses on measures that have strong cross-country and over time coverage: it includes both model-based and survey-based measures of informality and covers more than 160 economies for the period 1990-2018....

We study the degree of synchronization between formal- and informal-economy business cycles. Using a comprehensive database of informal activity that covers a wide range of informality measures from almost 160 countries over the 1990-2018 period, we report two major results. First, fluctuations...

Can taxes on consumption redistribute in developing countries? Contrary to consensus, we show that taxing consumption is progressive once we account for informal consumption. Using household expenditure surveys in 32 countries we proxy for informal consumption using the type of store where...