Those engaging in tax non-compliance have been conventionally explained as rational economic actors partaking when the benefits outweigh the costs, and thus public administrations have sought to enforce compliance using a deterrence approach which increases the risk of detection and penalties....

To help countries make progress on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) Indicator 8.3.1 ("Proportion of informal employment in non-agriculture employment, by sex"), this paper presents an integrated strategic policy approach. This is where: a national government facilitates the...

This article evaluates critically the competing explanations for informal sector entrepreneurship that read such endeavours to result from either ‘exclusion' from state benefits and the circuits of the modern economy or the voluntary ‘exit' of workers from formal institutions. Reporting...

Drawing inspiration from institutional theory, a small sub-stream of literature has proposed that participation in the informal economy arises from the lack of alignment of a society's formal institutions (i.e. its codified laws and regulations) with its informal institutions (i.e. the norms,...

The aim of this paper is to map the spatial variations in the size of the shadow economy within Brussels. Reporting data provided by the National Bank of Belgium on the deposit of high denomination banknotes across bank branches in the 19 municipalities of the Brussels-Capital Region, the...

This paper evaluates critically whether the cross-national variations in the size of the informal economy are the result of: under-development (a modernisation perspective); high taxes, corruption and state interference (neo-liberal perspective), or inadequate state intervention to protect...

To evaluate whether and how the prevalence and nature of off-the-books entrepreneurship varies across deprived and affluent neighborhoods in an advanced economy, face-to-face interviews are here reported conducted with 511 households in English affluent and deprived urban neighborhoods. The...