La economía sombra; tamaño e incidencia sobre el crecimiento económico. Evidencia para Ecuador, Perú y Colombia

Abstract

This article estimates the size of the Shadow Economy (ES) in Ecuador, Peru and Colombia through the application under two approaches: i) the money demand analysis for the period 1984-2017, on the thesis that the result of shadow economies, comes from the changes in the demand for money; and ii) the multiple indicators multiple cause approach (MIMIC) for the period 1995-2017, this approach considerate the ES as a latent variable linked to a set of observable causes and indicators that reflect changes in its size. The first approach uses an autoregressive model with distributed lags (ARDL), on average for the period under analysis the ES for Ecuador is estimated at 37%, for Peru 62% and in Colombia it represents 52% of official GDP. For the MIMIC, the size of the ES in Ecuador, Peru and Colombia is 40%, 77% and 50% of GDP, respectively. At the same time, these results allow to infer that a growing tax burden combined with excessive intensity of regulations and control over the economy, as well as unemployment, are the forces that seem to be driving the growth of the shadow economy in these countries. Knowing the ES levels, it seeks to explore their impact on economic growth, finding a positive effect; therefore, the empirical evidence on the procyclicality of the ES supports the conclusion that the two sectors are complementary.