ظاهرة الاقتصاد الخفي : الآثار و آليات المواجهة

Abstract EN

The phenomenon of the growth of hidden economies, in its various shapes and forms, has become one of the most dangerous and most important challenges facing all developing and developed countries alike, leaving behind many negative impacts, such as the loss of tax revenues and the lack of accurate information about the state of the national economy.

In addition to the poor distribution of resources, the occurrence of many distortions in the structure and structure of incomes, imbalance of balance of payments, high rates of inflation, and few positive ones, such as providing scarce goods and absorbing the largest number of the unemployed.

There are many reasons leading to the spread of this phenomenon, which comes in the forefront of which is the attempt to evade paying tax liabilities, especially if they rise, in addition to the spread of bureaucracy, administrative corruption, high unemployment rates, scarcity of goods, and the predominance of small and medium enterprises in the national economy.

And given the fact that this economy is characterized by being hidden or informal and not subject to state control, the question of finding out its true size is considered to be one of the thorny issues in economics, and in an attempt to find out its approximate size, economists have provided some methods (direct and indirect) to estimate this size, as these methods estimate that between 60% to 70% of the size of the formal economy in Egypt is a hidden economy.

This research comes as an attempt to understand the concept of this phenomenon, and to define its characteristics, causes, effects and methods of measuring it, and then put forward a number of recommendations for how to confront it and limit its consequences and negative impacts.