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...

Recently, there has been growing recognition that some formal employees receive from their formal employers two wages, namely an official declared wage plus an additional undeclared (envelope) wage, which reduces the tax and social contributions paid to the authorities. The aim of this paper is...

To explain the shadow economy in the Baltic states of Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia, this paper evaluates the relationship between the shadow economy and tax morale. Viewing tax morale as a measure of the symmetry between the codified laws and regulations of formal institutions (state morality)...

In recent years, it has been increasingly recognised that governments seeking to tackle undeclared work effectively should adopt a holistic approach. This seeks to coordinate strategy across the fields of labour, tax and social security law, and to use the full range of policy measures...

This paper provides an evidence-based evaluation of the competing ways of explaining and tackling the informal economy. Conventionally, participants have been viewed as rational economic actors who engage in the informal economy when the benefits outweigh the costs, and thus participation is...

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...

In this paper the main focus lies on the shadow economy and on work in the shadow. The most influential factors on the shadow economy are tax policies and state regulation. The size of the shadow economy was decreasing over 1999 to 2007 from 34.0% to 31.2% for 161 countries (unweighted average)....

PurposeAlthough there is emerging an understanding that many entrepreneurs conduct some or all of their transactions off-the-books, there has so far been little attempt to consider what can and should be done about entrepreneurship in the informal economy. The aim of this paper is to bridge this...

This paper evaluates critically the validity of the competing conceptualizations of informal employment that variously read such work as a leftover of a previous mode of production, a by-product of, alternative or complement to formal employment. Until now, the common tendency has been for...

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...