Purpose: The aim of this paper is to evaluate contrasting ways of tackling self-employment in the informal sector. Conventionally, the participation of the self-employed in the informal sector has been viewed as a rational economic decision taken when the expected benefits outweigh the costs,...

To evaluate critically the common assumption that consumers purchase goods and services on an off-the-books basis so as to save money, this paper reports a 27-nation European survey that interviewed 26,659 citizens in 2007 about their undeclared transactions. This reveals that saving money is...