Consumption in the Dark: Estimating Unrecorded Expenditures of Households in Croatia

The unofficial sector is generally regarded as an important liability for the development of a post-transitional society. In this paper we adopt a new approach to estimate the unofficial economy by estimating the unrecorded consumption of households in Croatia. This is done by means of conducting a nationally representative survey on payment habits of the Croatian consumers and by pairing these data with the household consumption survey. Our main focus concerns cash payments without an issued receipt, which is assumed to represent the unofficial part of transactions. In this way we circumvent some notable deficiencies of direct surveys on income reporting and selective reviews. We find that the part of unofficial economy arising from household consumption was around 0.69 percent of GDP in 2014.