Shadow Economies of 145 Countries all over the World: What Do We Really Know?

CREMA Working Paper Series from Center for Research in Economics, Management and the Arts (CREMA)

Abstract: Estimations of the size and development of the shadow economy for 145 countries, including developing, transition and highly developed OECD economies over the period 1999 to 2003 are presented. The average size of the shadow economy (as a percent of ?official? GDP) in 2002/03 in 96 developing countries is 38.7%, in 25 transition countries 40.1%, in 21 OECD countries 16.3% and in 3 Communist countries 22.3%. An increased burden of taxation and social security contributions, combined with a labor market regulation are the driving forces of the shadow economy. Finally, the various estimation methods are discussed and critically evaluated.

Keywords: shadow economy of 145 countries; tax burden; tax moral; quality of state institutions; regulation; DYMIMIC and other estimation methods (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D78 H11 H2 H26 O17 O5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2005-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-afr, nep-dev and nep-pbe
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (181)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.crema-research.ch/papers/2005-13.pdf Full Text (application/pdf)
https://www.crema-research.ch/abstracts/2005-13.htm Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cra:wpaper:2005-13

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CREMA Working Paper Series from Center for Research in Economics, Management and the Arts (CREMA) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Anna-Lea Werlen ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).