National accounts, fiscal rules and fiscal policy. Mind the hidden gaps

Maurizio Bovi ()

No 76, ISAE Working Papers from ISAE - Institute for Studies and Economic Analyses - (Rome, ITALY)

Abstract: Underground activities affect crucial fiscal ratios generating “gaps” both in government revenues and in national accounts. I address this topic exploiting the peculiarities of the Italian situation. First, I describe the pros and cons of the Italian method to estimate the (non trivial share of) shadow economy. This sheds some light on the reliability of GDP estimates and allows unraveling some policy-relevant national accounts gaps. Second, I examine the links between undeclared incomes, tax burden and fiscal policy in a system possibly suffering from unpleasant arithmetic. Data suggest that government revenues and tax evasion go hand-in-hand and highlight the difficulties of policymaking.

Keywords: Fiscal Rules; National Accounts; Shadow Economy; Taxation. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C32 C53 E26 H26 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eec, nep-mac and nep-pbe
Date: 2007-01
View list of references

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.isae.it/Working_Papers/WP_76_2007_Bovi.pdf (application/pdf)

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:isa:wpaper:76

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ISAE Working Papers from ISAE - Institute for Studies and Economic Analyses - (Rome, ITALY)
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Anita Guelfi ().