Business Commons^™

Across the EU28, there is not only a significant ‘jobs gap’ with only 70.1 per cent of

the working age population in jobs but also concerns over the quality of jobs. One

particular concern is that employees are being falsely classified as self-employed by

employers in order to circumvent collective agreements, labour laws (e.g., minimum

wages, working time legislation), employment tax and other employer liabilities implied

in the standard contract of employment, and that the emergent ‘gig’ or ‘platform’ economy

is accelerating this trend.

This report evaluates this emergent employment relationship, here termed ‘dependent’

self-employment, which covers those classified as …

This report examines the drivers of the undeclared economy in Croatia, the current organisation of the fight against undeclared work, and reviews the current and potential policy approaches and measures for tackling undeclared work in Croatia.

 

Recently, significant advances have been made in explaining the determinants of undeclared work. To explain undeclared work, it has been understood that every society has institutions which prescribe, monitor and enforce the ‘rules of the game’ regarding what is socially acceptable. In all societies, these institutions are of two types: formal institutions that prescribe ‘state morality’ …

Drawing upon the results of 26,659 face-to-face interviews in the 27 member states of the

European Union (EU-27), the aim of this paper is to evaluate its varying magnitude and

whether such work is mostly wage-based (of an envelope wage or undeclared variety) or

own-account work (of a market-oriented or solidarity-oriented variety). The finding is

that in ‘welfare capitalist’ work and welfare regimes, which are more equal (measured by

the gini coefficient) pursue more extensive labour market interventions, have higher

levels of social protection and greater state redistribution, undeclared economies are

smaller and are composed mostly of solidarity-oriented own-account work. …

The need to integrate work beyond employment into discussions of labor practices is widely recognized. This has been so far largely achieved by adopting a dual economies perspective, which is criticized for depicting the formal and informal sectors as separate hostile worlds. To resolve this, an alternative “total social organization of labor” approach is here proposed that maintains the terms formal and informal as useful broad descriptors of different work relations, but recognizes a spectrum from purely formal to purely informal labor practices cross-cut by another spectrum from wholly monetized to wholly non-monetized labor practices. Reporting evidence from 861 face-to-face …

Recent research has revealed that a large proportion of entrepreneurs startup

their ventures operating on a wholly or partially off-the-books basis. Until now, it

has been commonly assumed that those who operate in the informal economy are

exclusively commercial entrepreneurs. They are assumed to be rational economic

actors who weigh up the benefits of operating off-the-books against the costs of

being caught and decide to operate in this manner. The aim of this paper is to

evaluate critically this a priori assumption. Reporting evidence from a 2005/6 survey

involving face-to-face interviews with 102 informal entrepreneurs in Moscow in

Russia, the …