Shadow economies all over the world : new estimates for 162 countries from 1999 to 2007

By Friedrich Schneider, Andreas Buehn, C. E. Montenegro. 2010

849 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper presents estimations of the shadow economies for 162 countries, including developing, Eastern European, Central Asian, and high-income countries over the period 1999 to 2006/2007. According to the estimations, the weighted average size of the shadow economy (as a percentage of"official"gross domestic product) in Sub-Saharan Africa is 38.4 percent; in Europe and Central Asia (mostly transition countries), it is 36.5 percent, and in high-income OECD countries, it is 13.5 percent. The authors find a clear negative trend in the size of the shadow economy: The unweighted average of the 162 countries in 1999 was 34.0 percent and in 2007 31.0 percent; hence a reduction of 3 percentage points!.The driving forces of the shadow economy are an increased burden of taxation (both direct and indirect), combined with labor market regulations and the quality of public goods and services, as well as the state of the"official"economy.

Subfields: Accounting, Economics and Econometrics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/87a86d64a163bd21cbf22c636299c4246a53eeca

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Citations in the corpus

The Informal Economy Worldwide: Trends and Characteristics (2012, neutral): “The estimation of the underground economy through econometric modelling (see, for instance, Schneider, 2005; Schneider and Enste, 2000; Schneider et al., 2010) is certainly interesting, but the comparison of the results with the current GDP is particularly misleading because the national accounts al”
The Informal Economy in Sub-Saharan Africa: Size and Determinants (2017, positive): “It was later used in a number of studies, including Loayza (1997) and Schneider, Buehn, and Montenegro (2010). the methodology.3 The MIMIC Model relies on the following observable drivers of the informal economy: • Tax burden.”
Asset Divestment as a Response to Media Attacks in Stigmatized Industries (2014, methodology): “To capture this variation, we controlled for home market transparency, which represents the size of the official economy as a percentage of the gross domestic product (GDP) of the firm’s home country (Schneider, Buehn, and Montenegro, 2010).”
How Does Corruption Affect Public Debt? An Empirical Analysis (2017, background): “The studies of Schneider et al. (2010) and Kaufmann (2010) show that a large shadow economy reduces the ability of a government to raise tax revenues.”
Evidence of the invisible: toward a credibility revolution in the empirical analysis of tax evasion and the informal economy (2012, background): “58 Three examples in Schneider et al. (2010) are: 1) an element of B is the labor force participation rate and an element of H is the unemployment rate (these two variables have a direct, mechanical relationship), 2) an element of B is M0/M1 and an element of H is the inflation rate, and 3) an…”
Macro-level determinants of formal entrepreneurship versus informal entrepreneurship (2014, background): “…the argument that cultural practices have a stronger predictive power on the level of entrepreneurship since they are related to answers by respondents concerning typical behavior in their culture versus personal preferences (House et al., 2004; Schneider et al., 2010b; Stephan and Uhlaner, 2010).”
Sustainable (2014, background): “The evidence for Africa 5 suggests that investment in infrastructure should be scaled up significantly.”
Pollution, Shadow Economy and Corruption: Theory and Evidence (2012, neutral): “5% of the official GDP in over 162 countries (Schneider et al., 2010).”