11/24/09 Stockholm, Sweden – In tough economic times people turn to creative measures in order to get by, and Americans are behaving no differently. With high unemployment informal entrepreneurs, in particular the kind that don’t pay taxes, are coming out of the woodwork. After all, necessity is the mother of invention.
According to the Christian Science Monitor, “the shadow economy makes up a larger portion of the economies of countries like Greece (25 percent) or Mozambique (more than 40 percent) than it does in the US. But because America’s economy is so much bigger, its shadow economy amounts to nearly 8 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) — in the ballpark of $1 trillion, estimates Friedrich Schneider, an economics professor at Johannes Kepler University in Linz, Austria. That’s bigger than the GDP of Turkey or Australia.”
You can read more details on America’s growing shadow economy in coverage from the Christian Science Monitor.
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