The aim of this article is to evaluate the prevalence and distribution in the European Union of a little discussed illegitimate employment practice whereby employers pay their formal employees both an official declared salary and an undeclared ‘envelope' wage so as to evade the full tax and...

To evaluate critically the policy options available for tackling the undeclared economy, this paper commences by evaluating the implications of four hypothetical policy choices, namely doing nothing, de-regulating the declared economy, eradicating the undeclared economy, or moving undeclared...

The aim of this article is to evaluate competing theories that variously explain the greater prevalence of envelope wages in some countries either as: a legacy of underdevelopment (modernisation thesis); due to high taxes, state corruption and burdensome regulations and controls (neo-liberal...

The aim of this article is to evaluate the competing theories that variously explain the greater prevalence of undeclared employment in some countries either as: a legacy of under-development; a result of the voluntary exit from declared employment due to the high taxes, state corruption and...

Attempts to nurture community self-help in deprived neighbourhoods presently tend to pursue the ‘third sector' route of developing community-based groups. Reporting data from recent UK government surveys of community involvement, however, this article uncovers how such a third sector approach...

PurposeFor many decades, European national governments sought to stamp out undeclared work using a repressive approach. In the changing economic context of declining employment participation rates, however, the European Commission has called for a new approach to transform undeclared work into...

Since the turn of the millennium, there has been widespread recognition that the informal economy is a sizeable and growing feature in the global economy. To explain this, neo-liberals have contended that the informal economy is a direct result of over-regulation, high taxes and state...

The analysis of employment relations needs to include work in the informal economy. For this purpose, we propose a ‘degrees of informalization' framework that evaluates the proportion of employment relations infused with informality and the nature of this permeation. We apply this framework to...

This paper reveals how many formal employees in the European Union receive from their formal employer not only a declared wage but also an additional undeclared (‘envelope') wage. Reporting a 2007 survey involving 26,659 face-to-face interviews, the finding is that 1 in 18 formal employees...