Tuesday, October 27, 2009

Shadow economy growth during crisis

According to the ministry of economy of Ukraine, the sharp collapse of the GDP in Ukraine can be partially explained by the relative expansion of the shadow economy. The shadow economy grew by 2.3% in 2008 according to the integral index of shadow economy. Actually it is an average of estimates calculate by three different methods: based on money demand, based on retail sales, and based on the share of unprofitable enterprises. The first two methods reported considerable increase of the shadow economy to 38% (by 12% according to the money demand based method), while the third method gives more conservative estimates of 29%.



The next picture demonstrate the differences in the size of the shadow economy in different industrial sectors in 2008 computed by the share of unprofitable enterprises method:



This figure actually cast some doubts on the method because it really surprising that the share of shadow activities in construction is lower than in the extraction of raw materials.

1 comment:

Tom said...

if the share of unprofitable enterprises goes up, there is more shadow economy? In that case, a crisis will almost by definition 'increase' the shadow economy, even if nothing changed in reality in terms of the shadow economy