Max Gillman and Dario Cziráky Inflation and Endogenous Growth in Underground Economies The wiiw Balkan Observatory

The paper examines the effect of inflation on the growth rate in economies with underground, or ”non-market”, sectors. The model incorporates a non-market good into an endogenous growth cash-inadvance economy with human capital. Taxes on labor and capital induce substitution into the non-market sector which avoids such taxes. However the non-market sector uses only cash for exchange and cannot avoid the inflation tax, while the market sector allows costly credit use. We estimate a MIMIC model for latent underground economy using monthly data for Bulgaria, Croatia and Romania. Furthermore, we estimate a dynamic structural equation model and investigate short-run effects of the underground economy on output growth and test for Granger causality and long-run cointegrating relationships using bivariate Granger-causality tests and Johansen’s maximum likelihood technique. The result indicate different shares of underground economies across the three countries and a positive long-run effect of underground economy on output growth. JEL Classification: E31, E13, O42, C31, C51, C52