Australia's Cash Economy: Are the Estimates Credible&quest

Trevor Breusch ()

The Economic Record, 2005, vol. 81, issue 255, pages 394-403

Abstract: The method of 'excess sensitivity' of Bajada (1999, 2000, 2001) indicates a large underground economy in Australia, with estimates of unrecorded income approximately 15 per cent of official gross domestic product. These estimates concern policy-makers, especially those agencies responsible for national accounts, tax collection, economic stabilisation and law enforcement. We show that the method exhibits a severe form of non-robustness, in which the results change markedly with a simple change in the units of measurement of the variables. There is a separate problem in which a key parameter is set to an unrealistic value that makes the estimates many times too high. Copyright 2005 The Economic Society Of Australia.

Date: 2005
View citations in EconPapers

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/servlet/useragent ... &year=2005&part=null link to full text (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:ecorec:v:81:y:2005:i:255:p:394-403

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=0013-0249

Access Statistics for this article

The Economic Record is edited by Paul Miller, Glenn Otto and Martin Richardson

More articles in The Economic Record from The Economic Society of Australia
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Christopher F. Baum ().