The aim of this paper is to evaluate the variable impacts of the informal economy on businesses and employment relations in South East Europe. Evidence is reported from the 2009 World Bank Enterprise Survey which interviewed 4,720 businesses located in South East Europe. The finding is not only...

Even though entrepreneurs are commonly depicted as risk takers, little evaluation has occurred on whether they weigh the costs of being caught and the level of punishments, and engage in off-the-books working practices. The aim of this paper is to evaluate the degree to which entrepreneurs...

An easy and popular method for measuring the size of the underground economy is to use macro-data such as money demand or electricity demand to infer what the legitimate economy needs, and then to attribute the remaining consumption to the underground economy. Such inferences rely on the...

A significant number of employees within the United States can be considered "informal" or "off-the-books" workers. These workers, who by definition do not appear in administrative wage records, are distinct from the larger group of private jobholders who do appear in administrative records....

The shadow (underground) economy plays a major role in many countries. People evade taxes and regulations by working in the shadow economy or by employing people illegally. On the one hand, this unregulated economic activity can result in reduced tax revenue and public goods and services, lower...

The paper presents estimations of the informal economy size in Bolivia from an application of a Dynamic General Equilibrium Model. The parameter estimation is performed using maximum likelihood method to obtain, as an intermediate result, a latent variable estimation of the informal economy...

To evaluate how undeclared work is being tackled in Croatia this paper reports an e-survey and in-depth interviews with key stakeholders in Croatia. It is revealed that, compared with the European Economic Area countries, Croatia has a weak institutional infrastructure for tackling undeclared...

For much of the previous century, the informal sector was largely represented as a residue of a previous mode of production confined to marginal populations and gradually disappearing due to the inevitable and natural shift towards the formal economy across the globe. Over the past quarter of a...