Évaluation de l'économie souterraine au Québec. Une approche micro-économétrique

Bernard Fortin (), Guy Lacroix and Dominique Pinard

Revue économique, 2009, vol. 60, issue 5, 1257-1274

Abstract: The main purpose of this paper is to estimate the size and the growth of Quebec?s underground economy, and the corresponding loss of taxes for the government. Our approach is based on a method developed by Pissarides and Weber [1989] and extended by Lyssiotou et al. [2004]. The basic hypothesis is that an individual can under-report his earnings from self-employment but not from paid work, upon which taxes are directly levied. We estimate a consumer demand system where the marginal propensity to consume is allowed to vary with the two types of earnings. We next estimate the size of the self-employment earnings that are under-reported. From this estimate, we calculate a relative size for the underground economy in Quebec. We use the data from Statistics Canada?s Survey of Household Expenditures. According to our results, Quebec?s underground economy amounted to 4.6% of GDP in 1997 and increased to 5.7% in 2002. For the government, this represents as much as $ 3.3 billions in forgone taxes for 2002 alone. Classification JEL : D12, E26, H26.

JEL-codes: D12 E26 H26 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.cairn.info/load_pdf.php?ID_ARTICLE=RECO_605_1257 (application/pdf)
http://www.cairn.info/revue-economique-2009-5-page-1257.htm (text/html)
free

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: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cai:recosp:reco_605_1257

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Revue économique from Presses de Sciences-Po
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jean-Baptiste de Vathaire ().