Guest-worker programs have been providing rapidly growing economies with millions of temporary foreign workers over the last couple of decades. With the duration of stay strictly limited by program rules in most of the host countries and wages paid to guest workers often set at sub-market...

In the last 20 years, Vietnam has been one of the fastest growing economies in Asia. But the coverage of social insurance is still low. Only around one in five workers is covered by the public social insurance scheme. Expanding the coverage of social insurance for informal sector workers and the...

It is well known that the size of the informal (black or grey) economy causes serious fiscal problems for Hungary. This study makes an attempt to quantify the budgetary and macroeconomic effects of different ways of widening the formal sector (whitening”) with the help of a model. It turns out...

Limited availability of workfare programs and unemployment insurance and a large informal sector are features of the Argentine labor market at the outset of the 2001 economic crisis. This paper tests the hypothesis whether informal work is an alternative to workfare participation before a...

This paper presents the first MIMIC (multiple indicator multiple causes) model estimate of the size and development of the shadow economy and of do-it-yourself (DIY) activities in Germany from 1970 to 2005. By 2005, they reached a level of about 17% and 4.94%. While the shadow economy has...

We further refine the Modified-Cash-Deposits-Ratio (MCDR) approach, developed by Pickhardt and Sardà (2011, 2012) with a view to analyze size and causes of the cash using section of the underground economy. Among other things, we address the issue of cash hoarding. Findings include that the...

Since there are no broadly accepted macro-level estimations for the size of the hidden economy, the interrelationships of the hidden economy with different segments of the labor market have to be approached in a number of different ways. In our cross-country analysis, in parts 2 and 3 we use...

It is estimated that only 5% of musicians in Italy are regularly employed. In an attempt at understanding such a peculiar situation, we build a theoretical model of the musicians' labour market in which we embed the main institutional features of the Italian system. We notice how the presence of...