서아프리카 국가들의 지하경제와 택스갭(Tax Gap)

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to estimate the size of shadow economy and tax gaps of 16 West African countries in the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). This paper employs a Multiple Indicator Multiple Cause (MIMIC) model with one latent variable in order to estimate the shadow economy and subsequently the tax gap. GDP per capita, unemployment rate, government effectiveness, and regulatory quality show negative signs on their coefficients implying an inverse relationship with the shadow economy and tax gap. Hence, their improvement will have a positive impact on those economies by narrowing the shadow economy and tax gap. It is also noticed that there is a general upward trend in the shadow economy in the West African countries. Rising shadow economy causes rising tax gap from 2008 to 2014, then a decline till 2017.