This paper evaluates critically the assumption that entrepreneurs who start-up their business ventures operating wholly or partially off-the-books are engaged in commercial entrepreneurship. Reporting evidence from a 2005-2006 survey involving face-to-face interviews with 298 informal...

To help countries make progress on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) Indicator 8.3.1 ("Proportion of informal employment in non-agriculture employment, by sex"), this paper presents an integrated strategic policy approach. This is where: a national government facilitates the...

This paper evaluates critically the argument of neo-liberals that informal employment is a result of high taxes, public sector corruption and too much state interference in the free market and that the consequent solution is to reduce taxes, public sector corruption and the regulatory burden via...

Over the past decade or so, there has been widespread recognition that a large and growing proportion of the global workforce is employed in informal sector enterprises. To explain this, neo-liberals contend that enterprises operate in the informal sector due to high taxes, public sector...

An economy is considered where a possibility to seek rents (a particular case of this activity is corruption) exists along with production. A producer is able to hide part of his output from both bribery and taxation. It is shown that the presence of a shadow sector has different effects in...

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...

This paper shows why some countries are trapped in an equilibrium with high unofficial economic activity and corruption while other countries are not. The potential for different outcomes follows directly from the complementary nature of unofficial economy and corruption activity