ASSESSING THE IMPACTS OF PERSONAL AND SOCIETAL NORMS AND PUBLIC STATUS ON TAX MORALE AND SHADOW ECONOMY BEHAVIORS: A WORLDWIDE APPROACH (Published)
More and more people around the world are operating businesses off the data grid in order to avoid payment of taxes. The boom in underground economies leave governments insufficient revenue to provide adequate public services, which include health care, roads, education, or even better tax collection. Numerous literatures exist on the single aspect of the hidden economy focusing on the size, causes, consequences, characterizing of its presence, a current study is lacking on the impacts of people’s perception on the growth of shadow economy. It is likely that this dearth of research on the impacts of peoples’ perception regarding underground economy activities in the past is the result of the difficulties in providing reliable official indicators for direction of intended government policy measures. Presently, attention is being drawn on people’s perceptions towards the shadow economy. This research study was conducted to address these limitations relating to underground economic activities from peoples’ perspective.
Keywords: Employment Status, Official Economy, Sam Agbi, Shadow Economy, Societal Norms, and Eniola Agbi
ANATOMY OF UNDERGROUND ECONOMY AROUND THE WORLD: WHAT DO WE REALLY KNOW? (Published)
Research experts on countries that are transiting from one economic state to another (transition countries) and developing countries have claimed that a large part of economic activities were done within the shadow. In applying the estimation techniques for measuring underground economy for the period 1995–2008, the results indicated the size of shadow activities to be 35–44% of GDP for developing economies, 21–30% of GDP for the countries transiting from communist to capitalist economy (transition economies) and 14–16% of GDP for the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) economies. For advance economies, the value of underground activities grew from 7.9% of GDP in 1976 to about 16% in 2008. Since 2005, academic and political debate on development finance and development aid has raised the issue that shadow economy in countries worldwide is becoming larger than can be imagined, consequently, the need to be concerned about its composition.
Keywords: Anatomy of Shadow Economy, Official Economy, Sam Agbi, Transition Economies, Underground Economy, and Eniola Agbi