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...

The aim of this paper is to evaluate two contrasting ways of explaining and tackling undeclared work. The rational economic actor approach theorizes undeclared work as arising when the benefits of undertaking undeclared work outweigh the costs, and the policy focus is upon deterring undeclared...

This paper evaluates critically the contrasting theories of informal employment that variously read this sector as a leftover of pre-capitalism, a by-product of a new emergent form of capitalism, a complement to formal employment or an alternative to the formal economy. Until now, a common...

In advanced economies, work beyond employment has been viewed very differently depending upon whether it is paid or not. Whilst unpaid work, especially voluntary work, has been perceived as something to be nurtured in order to rebuild trust and reciprocity in communities, paid informal work has...

Using a special module of the 2015 Mexican Labour Force Survey with information on workers' preferences for jobs with social security coverage, I estimate that 80 per cent of informal workers in large urban areas would prefer to work in a job that provides them with such coverage. A discrete...

While there is general agreement that regulatory avoidance is an important part of firms' decisions to produce in the informal sector, there is much less agreement on how regulation and enforcement affect firms' decisions on, inter alia, which sector they locate in, their employment decisions,...

Using a special module of the 2015 Mexican Labour Force Survey with information on workers' preferences for jobs with social security coverage, I estimate that 80 per cent of informal workers in large urban areas would prefer to work in a job that provides them with such coverage. The estimation...

Informal employment has been variously explained as resulting from: economic under-development and a lack of modernisation (modernisation theory); high taxes and state interference in the free market (neo-liberal theory) or inadequate levels of state intervention to protect citizens (political...

Purpose – This paper aims to evaluate critically the conventional binary hierarchical representation of the formal/informal economy dualism which reads informal employment as a residual and marginal sphere that has largely negative consequences for economic development and needs to be...

Objective: The article aims to indicate the determinants of informal employment in registered enterprises using company-level evidence from Poland. Research Design & Methods: The survey conducted among Polish small and medium-sized (SME) enterprises in 2018 was used to find the driving forces of...