Evaluating competing perspectives towards undeclared work: some lessons from Bulgaria

Colin Williams and Junhong Yang

Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe, 2018, vol. 26, issue 2-3, 247-265

Abstract: When explaining and tackling the undeclared economy in Central and Eastern Europe, participants have been conventionally viewed as rational economic actors. They engage in undeclared work when the benefits outweigh the costs. Participation is thus deterred by increasing the sanctions and/or probability of being caught. Recently, however, an alternative social actor approach has emerged which views participants as engaging in undeclared work when their norms, values and beliefs (i.e. citizen morale) do not align with laws and regulations (i.e. state morale). Here, therefore, initiatives to develop greater symmetry between civic and state morale are pursued. To evaluate the validity and effectiveness of these competing explanations and policy approaches, 2,004 face-to-face interviews conducted in Bulgaria in late 2015 are reported. Logit marginal effects regression analysis reveals no association between participation in undeclared work and the perceived level of penalties and risk of detection, but a strong significant association with the level of asymmetry between citizen and state morale; the greater the asymmetry, the higher is the likelihood of participation in undeclared work. The paper concludes by discussing the implications for explaining and tackling undeclared work.

Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/25739638.2018.1511112 (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: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:cdebxx:v:26:y:2018:i:2-3:p:247-265

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/cdeb20

DOI: 10.1080/25739638.2018.1511112

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe is currently edited by Andrew Kilmister

More articles in Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().