Documents hidden economy 80 results

"The shadow economy has long been an area of research for policymakers. The determinants of underground activity of late have been identified as high tax burdens and increased regulation, but has this relationship always existed? This seminal work examines the shadow economy in Norway, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States over the past 145 (from 1870 to 2015) years using the Currency Demand Approach and finds that the underground economy is stabilising. To our knowledge this is the first attempt to estimate the size and development of the shadow economy over such a long period and due to this we get some new insights. Our results clearly show that the shadow economy in earlier times was considerably higher than in the last 50 years. This paper also analyses whether a plateau has been reached and questions what efforts could be made to further reduce this informal economy."

"Homeworkers are a globally significant part of the informal workforce, commonly regarded as invisible because their work is not recognized (Burchielli et al., 2008; Prugl, 1999). In this qualitative study, we examine homeworker invisibility in the case of Argentinian garment homework using the concepts of work invisibilization and work denial.The work invisibilization concept (Krinsky and Simonet, 2012), referring to devalorized work resulting from the neoliberal agenda, is used to understand recent global trends away from standard work arrangements/protections. Arising from the social relations of domination, invisibilized work is precarious, with irregular/ non-existent employment contracts and relationships. Invisibilization thus provides a valuable lens for analysing homework, which shares key characteristics with emerging forms of invisibilized employment. Homework however, has not transformed but has always been informal, characterized by inferior standards. To account for this, we articulate a concept of denial of work.Cohen's (2001) concept of denial describes broad dimensions, including different forms, strategies and levels of denial. Adapting these, we construct a framework to analyze the denial of Argentinian garment homework, enabling a detailed examination of the specific social actors and processes involved in casting homework as non-work.In considering the denial of homework in relation to invisibilization, we argue that these are related but distinct concepts. Used together, they help explain the low-power condition of two types of garment homeworkers in Argentina while also accounting for their differences: the mostly male, migrant workers employed in clandestine workshops (such as the Bolivians interviewed in our study), and the traditional, mostly female, Argentinian garment homeworkers.Our findings suggest that Bolivian immigrant homeworkers are partially visibilized due to NGO advocacy. However, as there are no improvements to their working conditions, they remained largely invisibilized through the effects of capitalism. By contrast, traditional women homeworkers have no representation and internalize their condition: their invisibilization is explained by the cumulative effects of capitalism and patriarchy."

"This paper is a first attempt to study the size and development of the shadow economies of 157 countries over 1999 to 2013. Using a MIMIC model, we find that higher tax and regulatory burden, unemployment and self-employment rates are drivers of the shadow economy, meaning that an increase of these causal variables increases the shadow economy. Our result also confirms previous findings of Friedrich Schneider, Andreas Buehn and Claudia Montenegro (2010). The estimated average of informality of 157 countries around the world, including developing, eastern European, central Asian and high income OECD countries averaged over 1999 to 2013 is 33.77% of official GDP. A critical discussion about the size of these macro-estimates comes to the conclusion that most likely the "true" shadow economy of these countries is only 69% of their estimated macro-MIMIC-values."

"A large number of empirical studies pointed to the ongoing expansion of the shadow economy in many countries around the globe. A robust finding in these studies is the positive association between unemployment rates and the size of the unofficial sector. However, with consistent estimates of the size of the unofficial sector only available from the late 1980s, a lack of sufficient time span dictated the use of static models, allowing only a limited understanding of its temporal behavior and interdependence with other covariates. In this paper, we offer a first systematic attempt to estimate the dynamics of the shadow economy, using advanced dynamic panel techniques. Based on insights from a simple job search model of unemployment that features decreasing returns to unofficial activities and congestion effects in job searching, we conjecture a long-run equilibrium relationship between unemployment and the size of the shadow economy. Our empirical model lends strong support to this view. We find that in countries with less stringent job market regulation the long-run impact of Unemployment, the tax burden, and GDP on the shadow economy, while positive and significant, is much smaller than in heavily regulated countries Moreover, the speed of adjustment back to long-run equilibrium following temporary shocks is shown to be three times faster in countries with looser job-market regulation, compared with countries with stricter regulation. These findings have important policy implications."

"To synthesize the literature on determinants of the shadow economy, this paper uses three cross-national shadow economy measures and employs numerous determinants over hundreds of model combinations to identify robust determinants of the shadow economy and address modeling uncertainty. We find that bureaucratic complexity is more significant than monetary severity in driving shadow activity. The incentives of new shadow entrepreneurs are somewhat different. A one standard deviation increase in tax complexity increases overall shadow economy by over ten percent of the mean. In contrast, a similar increase in business startup costs increases new informal entrepreneurs by almost more than double."

"In this short paper an attempt is undertaken to calculate the tax losses which result from shadow economy activities in a country. These calculations are done for the 28 EU countries, for 3 non-EU countries and for 2 other highly-developed OECD countries. The total tax losses over all 28 EU-countries make up 450.8 billion euros or 3.6% of EU-28-GDP in 2011. In 2012 it were 457.3 billion euros or 3.5% of EU-28-GDP and in 2013 454.2 billion euros or 3.4% of EU-28-GDP. For the whole country sample used in this paper the tax losses amounted to 698.7 billion euros or 2.4% of GDP of these 33 countries in 2011. In 2012 the value of tax losses was 737.2 billion euros or 2.3% of GDP and in 2013 it was 713.1 billion euros or also 2.3% of total GDP of these 33 countries."

"This article will argue that the shadow banking system has been at the heart of the Great Crisis since its first manifestations in the summer of 2007. This system has been purposefully misunderstood, as it is essentially a complex machine of too-big-to-fail banks designed to make large private profits while creating infinitely larger amounts of public debt. Years into the crisis, the shadow banking system still presents the greatest threat to global financial stability. As the fundamental operational conditions of this system gradually become clearer, and the understanding of the risks greater, a proper understanding of shadow banking is essential if the enormous problems of this doomsday machine are to be resolved."

"Business leaders exert extraordinary influence on institution building in market economies but they think and act within institutional settings. This book combines both an elite approach with a varieties-of-capitalism approach. Comparing Poland, Hungary and East and West Germany, we perceive the transformations in East Central Europe and in Germany after 1989 as being intertwined.

Based on a joint survey, this book seeks to measure the level of the convergence of ideas among European business leaders, assuming it to be more extensive than the institutional convergence expected under the dominance of neoliberal discourse. Analyzing the institutional framework, organizational features like size, ownership and labour relations, and subjective characteristics like age, social origin, career patterns and attitudes of the recent business elites, we found significant differences between countries and the types of organization. The growing importance of economic degrees and internationalization shows astonishingly little explanatory power on the views of business leaders. The idea of a coordinated market economy is still relatively widespread among Germans, while their Hungarian and Polish counterparts are more likely to display a minimalist view of corporate responsibility to society and adverse attitudes towards employee representation. However, their attitudes frequently tend to be inconsistent, which mirrors the mixed type of capitalism in East Central Europe."