Shadow Economies Around the World: What Did We Learn Over the Last 20 Years?
By Leandro Medina, Friedrich Schneider. Social Science Research Network, 2018
866 citations recorded by the source corpus.
We undertake an extended discussion of the latest developments about the existing and new estimation methods of the shadow economy. New results on the shadow economy for 158 countries all over the world are presented over 1991 to 2015. Strengths and weaknesses of these methods are assessed and a critical comparison and evaluation of the methods is carried out. The average size of the shadow economy of the 158 countries over 1991 to 2015 is 31.9 percent. The largest ones are Zimbabwe with 60.6 percent, and Bolivia with 62.3 percent of GDP. The lowest ones are Austria with 8.9 percent, and Switzerland with 7.2 percent. The new methods, especially the new macro method, Currency Demand Approach (CDA) and Multiple Indicators Multiple Causes (MIMIC) in a structured hybrid-model based estimation procedure, are promising approaches from an econometric standpoint, alongside some new micro estimates. These estimations come quite close to others used by statistical offices or based on surveys.
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7fc20441bd9319f957973138ba9955e2e40fc54d
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
- Leandro Medina
- Răzvan Hoinaru
- Daniel Buda
- Friedrich Schneider
- S. Borlea
- V. Văidean
- M. Achim
- Andreas Buehn
Citations in the corpus
- The Impact of Corruption and Shadow Economy on the Economic and Sustainable Development. Do They “Sand the Wheels” or “Grease the Wheels”? (2020, methodology): “We measure the shadow economy using data provided by Medina and Schneider [35] for the 2005–2015 time period, throughout which it is calculated as a percentage of the official GDP.”
- Shedding Light on the Shadow Economy: A Global Database and the Interaction with the Official One (2019, background): “…there are overlapping areas, like prostitution, illegal construction firms or corruption, compare e.g. Dreher and Schneider (2009), Dreher and Katsogrannis (2009), Williams and Schneider (2016), Schneider (2017), and Medina and Schneider (2018) compare also section 2, where this problem is tackled.”