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...

How many entrepreneurs start-up their business ventures conducting some or all of their trade in the informal economy? The aim of this paper is to answer this key question that has been seldom addressed using data from 600 face-to-face structured interviews conducted in Ukraine in late 2005 and...

This article provides a critical evaluation of the competing discourses that variously represent the informal economy as a residue or leftover of some pre-capitalist era, a by-product of a new type of emergent formal economy, an alternative mode of work organization or a complement to the formal...

This paper examines why some transitions are more successful than others by focusing attention on the role of productive, protective and predatory behaviors from the perspective of the new institutional economics. Many transition economies are characterized by a fundamental inconsistency between...

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...

We examine the extent, causes and consequences of transition countries’ use of foreign currency as a co-circulating medium of exchange and store of value. Using new estimates of foreign cash in circulation, we obtain unique measures of currency substitution, asset substitution, and...

A number of studies have examined the relationship between tax collection and various demographic variables. However, until recently most of those studies have involved a United States sample population. The Internal Revenue Service provides demographic data for researchers on a regular basis....