The seminal paper by Pissarides and Weber (1989) is one of several previous studies trying to measure the size of the black economy. Pissarides and Weber compared the relationship between food expenditure and income in two groups of workers, self-employed and employees in employment, assuming...

Until now, those seeking to undertake a cross-national comparison of undeclared work have had to rely on tenuous proxy indicators, such as the amount of cash in circulation or the amount of electricity consumed, due to the absence of direct survey evidence. In 2007, however, the first...

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, many Russian and Ukrainian households have experienced periods of economic marginalization. The role of this paper is to examine these social costs of transition, noting that official reporting underestimates the true scale of the problem, and the...

Throughout the western world, the informal economy is now a priority for action in public policy circles. This paper analyzes how the UK government has sought to tackle this issue by attempting to join-up the myriad of actions being taken across government with regard to this realm, and...

The aim of this paper is to evaluate whether undeclared work is the same when conducted by men and women. Conventionally, the view is that such work is always profit-motivated market-like work and that women's undeclared work mirrors their subjugated position in the formal labour market in terms...

Viewing undeclared work as market-like activity conducted for monetary gain, and participation as a rational economic decision, the widespread public policy response has been to seek to deter engagement in such work by ensuring that the expected cost of being caught and punished is greater than...

PurposeThis paper evaluates critically the assumption that the main reason for acquiring domestic services from the off-the-books economy is to save money. MethodologyData is reported from an Internet survey of 5,500 people living in households with one or more members in employment in the city...

Analyzing the extensive literature on informal work reveals multiple, often contradictory, views regarding its relationship with formal work. The aim of this paper is to evaluate critically these competing claims. Evaluating in turn the predominant views of informal work as a residue,...

Purpose – This paper evaluates critically the meta-narrative that capitalism is becoming totalizing and hegemonic. Grounded in an emerging corpus of post-development thought that has deconstructed this discourse in relation to western economies and the majority (third) world, the purpose of...

PurposeUntil now, in the absence of direct survey data, economists have had to rely on indirect methods that employ proxy indicators to evaluate the size of the shadow economy. In this paper, however, the results of the first direct survey of business perceptions of the magnitude of the shadow...