{"title":"Digitalization and informal economy: a global evidence of internet usage","authors":"Canh Phuc Nguyen, Christophe Schinckus, Quang Binh Nguyen, Duyen Thuy Le Tran","doi":"10.1007/s40812-023-00278-w","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"This article investigates the links between the technological evolution and the importance of informal economic activities. We examine the influences of internet usage on the shadow economy in a global sample between 2002 and 2015. With this purpose, we mobilize the panel fixed-effects estimate and the panel corrected standard errors estimate (as a robustness check) for the analysis of 114 economies (and three sub-samples including high-income economies (HIEs), upper-middle-income economies (UMEs), and lower-middle-income economies (LMEs)). Our results indicate that the use of the internet generally has a negative impact on the shadow economy. This influence of internet is consistent across all institutional environments. Interestingly, technology is not spread through the shadow economy in the same way everywhere since we observe a U-shaped relationship between internet usage and the shadow economy. Our research shows that technology might also have a negative influence on official activities if its implementation is not combined with an appropriate institutional policy allowing policy-makers to avoid the technology-side effects.","PeriodicalId":38200,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Industrial and Business Economics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.5000,"publicationDate":"2023-09-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Journal of Industrial and Business Economics","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s40812-023-00278-w","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"ECONOMICS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
This article investigates the links between the technological evolution and the importance of informal economic activities. We examine the influences of internet usage on the shadow economy in a global sample between 2002 and 2015. With this purpose, we mobilize the panel fixed-effects estimate and the panel corrected standard errors estimate (as a robustness check) for the analysis of 114 economies (and three sub-samples including high-income economies (HIEs), upper-middle-income economies (UMEs), and lower-middle-income economies (LMEs)). Our results indicate that the use of the internet generally has a negative impact on the shadow economy. This influence of internet is consistent across all institutional environments. Interestingly, technology is not spread through the shadow economy in the same way everywhere since we observe a U-shaped relationship between internet usage and the shadow economy. Our research shows that technology might also have a negative influence on official activities if its implementation is not combined with an appropriate institutional policy allowing policy-makers to avoid the technology-side effects.
期刊介绍:
This peer-reviewed journal, established in 1973, uses the lenses of industrial and business economics to investigate issues relevant to scholars, managers and policy makers.
The key areas of interest of JIBE are: industrial organization and policy; international business and international economics; innovation and entrepreneurship; corporate governance and finance.
Within these key areas, JIBE pays special attention to topics relating to grand challenges in a transforming world. A non exhaustive list of current issues includes: emergent technologies and industry dynamics; the digitalization of industries and financial markets; evolving multinationals and global value chains; environmental change and green transition; sustainable development of emerging economies; competition, regulation and structural policies in the platform economy.
JIBE welcomes papers that combine advancements in the theoretical understanding of phenomena with rigorous, systematic and original evidence-based empirical analysis, using quantitative or qualitative approaches as well as experimental and mixed methods. The journal is open to industry-, firm- and individual-level analyses, while the geographic scope may vary from subnational regions to nations and supra-national contexts, with a particular consideration of the EU and other integration processes.
The journal also publishes special issues and symposia aimed at opening debate among scholars on specific topics and discovery-type papers on emerging issues in industrial and business economics.
The journal is owned by the Associazione Amici di Economia e Politica Industriale.