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The purpose of this study is to assess the impact of the shadow economy on three sustainable development indicators while considering the moderating effect of the governance quality, and to highlight the non-linearity of the considered relationship.

A sample of 82 countries covering the period from 1996 to 2017. The dynamic first-differenced generalized method of moments (FD-GMM) panel threshold model is implemented to control for non-linearity.

The shadow economy hinders sustainable development in countries with low-governance quality, while the opposite result holds in countries with high-governance quality. The critical thresholds triggering the switch from one regime to another vary across the sustainable development indicators. Boosting growth requires enhancing the legal system and the economic dimension of governance, while promoting environmental quality requires the implementation and enforcement of specific environment-friendly regulations.

The study addresses non-linearity and the moderating effect of governance quality. The use of six governance indicators allows to gauge the ability of each governance dimension to curb the negative effects of the shadow economy. Considering the three objectives of sustainable development allows to identify specific policy recommendations for each of them.

To explain the shadow banking regime that will be enforced in the European Union by local regulators starting in January 2017.

Recognising the regulatory-induced difficulties in the process of identifying certain types of clients (investment funds) as shadow banking entities, this article provides a decision tree for the shadow banking classification process in order to aid the impacted institutions with the assessment of their clients. With this in mind, the article advises the impacted institutions on the specific steps that should be taken when assessing investment funds for shadow banking flags. Furthermore, the article provides insights into the information required to conduct the shadow banking classification process.

The regime requires the impacted institutions to assess their clients for shadow banking flags in order to impose limits on credit lines to clients classified as shadow banking entities. The US regulatory jurisdiction will be impacted over a longer term.

The recommendations in this article will be especially useful for investment funds to ensure that the relevant information is clearly stated in their prospectuses in order to avoid being classified as shadow banking entities.

The purpose of this paper is to examine recent developments pertaining to China’s shadow banking sector. Shadow banking has the potential not only to be a beneficial contributor to continued economic growth, but also to contribute to systematic instability if not properly monitored and regulated. An assessment is made in this paper as to whether shadow banking is beneficial or harmful to China’s economic growth.

The authors start with providing an overview of shadow banking from a global perspective, with information on its recent growth and importance in selected countries. The authors then focus directly on China’s shadow banking sector, with information on the various entities and activities that comprise the sector. Specifically, the authors examine the interconnections between shadow banking and regular banking in China and the growth in shadow banking to overall economic growth, the growth in the money supply and the growth in commercial bank assets.

Despite the wide range in the estimates, the trend in the size of shadow banking in China has been upward over the examined period. There are significant interconnections between the shadow banking sector and the commercial banking sector. Low deposit rate and high reserve requirement ratios have been the major factors driving its growth. Shadow banking has been a contributor, along with money growth, to economic growth.

The authors argue that shadow banking may prove useful by diversifying China’s financial sector and providing greater investments and savings opportunities to consumers and businesses throughout the country, if the risks of shadow banking are adequately monitored and controlled.

To the authors’ knowledge, this paper is among the few to systematically evaluate the influence of shadow banking on China’s economic growth.

Energy poverty is a global phenomenon, but its prevalence is enormous in most African countries, with a potential impact on quality of life. This study aims to investigate the impact of energy poverty on the shadow economy.

The study uses panel data from 45 countries in Africa over a period of 1996–2018. Using panel cointegrating regression and panel vector auto-regression model in the generalized method of moments technique.

This study provides that energy poverty deepens the size of the shadow economy in Africa. It also documents that there is a bidirectional causality between shadow economy and energy poverty. Therefore, the two variables can predict each other.

The study suggests that lack of access to clean and modern energy services contributes to the depth of the shadow economy in Africa. African authorities are advised to strengthen rural and urban electrification initiatives by providing adequate energy infrastructure so as to reduce the level of energy poverty in the region. To ensure energy sustainability delivery, the study proposes that the creation of national and local capacities would be the most effective manner to guarantee energy accessibility and affordability. Also, priorities should be given to the local capital mobilization and energy subsidies for the energy poor. Energy literacy may also contribute to the sustainability and the usage of modern energy sources in Africa.

Previous studies reveal that income inequality contributes to the large size of shadow economy in developing economies. However, none of these studies analyzed the role of energy poverty and its implications for underground economic operations. Inadequate access to modern energy sources is likely to deepen the prevalence of informality in developing nations. Based on this, this study provides fresh evidence on the implications of energy deprivation on the shadow economy in Africa using a heterogeneous panel econometric framework. The study contributes to the literature by advocating that the provision of affordable modern energy sources for rural and urban settlements, and the creation of good energy infrastructure for the firms in the formal economy would not only improve the quality of life but also important to discourage underground economic operations in developing economies.

The study's objective is to examine the relevance of globalization in affecting the size of the shadow economy in selected African nations.

To do this, the authors employ the KOF globalization index and implement both static and dynamic common correlated mean group estimators on a panel of 24 African nations from 1995–2017. This technique accommodates the issue of cross-sectional dependence, sample bias and endogenous regressors. Panel threshold analysis is also conducted to establish the nonlinearity between globalization and the shadow economy. To examine the causality between the variables, the study employs Dumitrescu and Hurlin's panel causality test.

The results show that globalization reduces the size of the shadow economy. The results of the nonlinear analysis suggest a U-shaped relationship. Overall globalization has a threshold impact of 48.837%, economic globalization has 45.615% and political globalization has 66.661% while social globalization has a threshold value of 35.744%. The results of the panel causality show that there is a bidirectional causality between the two variables.

The results suggest that the government and other relevant authorities need to introduce capital controls and other policy measures to moderate the degree of social, political and cultural diffusion. Appropriate policies should be formulated to monitor the extent of African economic openness to other continents to maximize the gains from globalization.

Apart from being the first study in the African region that evaluates the relevance of globalization in controlling the shadow economy, it also analyzes the dynamics and threshold analysis between the two variables using advanced panel econometrics which makes the study unique. The study suggests that globalization tools are useful for affecting the size of the shadow economy in Africa. This study provides fresh empirical evidence on the impact of globalization on the shadow economy in the case of Africa.

Building on the first cross-national study that had demystified various assumptions about the worldwide use of shadow education two decades ago, we analyze data from the 2012 Programme for International Student Assessment to examine the cross-national pattern of the use of shadow education by families in 64 nations and use improved statistical estimation methods. Focusing on fee-paying out-of-school classes, we find a continued, and likely an intensified pattern of the cross-national use of shadow education in the contemporary world. Approximately about one-third of all 15-year-old students from 64 countries/economies across the world use this form of shadow education. Students of higher socioeconomic status, females, and students in urban areas and general programs are more likely to use fee-paying services, while families and students turn to these services to address academic deficiencies in general. In addition, students from poorer countries more extensively rely on shadow education than students from wealthier countries after controlling for other variables. Students in South-Eastern and Eastern Asian countries are more likely to pursue shadow education than their counterparts in many other regions. Implications of these findings for theories of education and society as well as for educational policy in relation to shadow education are discussed.

This chapter aims to offer a focussed critical discussion of the combination of two qualitative data-collection methods used in a longitudinal multiple case study investigating the impact of intra-European mobility on the students' linguistic and intercultural development. The participant being the main (and often the only) source of data in higher education research, this chapter will centre on the use of shadowing as a data-collection strategy and on how this offered an other-report that favoured the co-construction and negotiation of meaning between the researcher and the research participant(s) in the narrative interview. Based on our experience shadowing and interviewing undergraduate students, we will stress: (1) the advantages of combining the direct and first-hand nature of the experience of the researcher with the participants' accounts of their experiences and (2) the need to not only rely on the participants' self-report(s) but also obtain an other-report about the phenomena being studied.

A report of the International Labour Organization on undeclared work in Greece refers to failures of formal institutions which contribute to the asymmetry between state and civic morality. The particular asymmetry is explored through the context of tax morale, which is one of the major determinants of the shadow economy. Although several papers have been published on the Greek shadow economy, tax morale in Greece has not been adequately explored. This research aims to investigate the effect of the economic downturn on the factors determining the level of tax morale through primary data from a European Union-funded research project on the Greek shadow economy. The findings provide policy orientations toward transferring activities from the shadow to the official economy, a goal which is part of Europe 2020 strategy.

The impacts of institutional quality on entrepreneurship are well established. However, the effects of an external factor, such as the shadow economy, that moderates this relationship have largely been neglected in existing literature. As such, this paper investigates how the shadow economy moderates the effects of institutional quality on entrepreneurship in a global sample of 79 economies from 2006 to 2018, when the latest required data are available.

This paper utilizes the fixed-effect and generalized method of moments (GMM) estimation techniques. Various scenarios have been considered for the robustness of the analysis, including different estimation techniques, different estimates of the shadow economy and various subsamples of countries with different income levels.

Empirical findings indicate that improved institutional quality boosts entrepreneurship activities, while the extended shadow economy is associated with reduced entrepreneurship activities. Interestingly, the positive impacts of institutional quality on entrepreneurship will be lessened with a larger shadow economy. These findings have remained largely unchanged across samples of countries and different proxies and estimation techniques.

Findings from this paper offer policymakers the relationships between institutional quality, shadow economy and entrepreneurship and the moderating effects of shadow economy on the institutional quality–entrepreneurship nexus. The implication is that institutional quality should be strengthened while the shadow economy should be controlled to promote entrepreneurship initiatives.

To the best of the author's knowledge, this is the first empirical study to explore the moderating effects of the shadow economy on the institutional quality–entrepreneurship nexus.