Italy in black. Report on the underground economy (2012)

The Report on the underground economy produced by Eurispes and the San Pio V Institute in Rome analyses the Italian economic context in the light of the most recent data on tax evasion, illegal work, the action of the Inland Revenue, the balance of families facing the “third-week syndrome”, the consumption of luxury goods and the phenomenon of the “false poor”, and legislative measures aimed at re-emerging the underground economy and combating evasion. The picture drawn by the Report presents the portrait of an economy forced to heavily rely on the underground economy to tackle the crisis, and in which evasion appears, in many cases, almost an option for survival.
The imbalance between income and expenditure reveals the presence of ‘undeclared’ family wealth, without which even normal administrative expenditure would be almost unsustainable in the medium/long term. It was therefore decided, by means of the investigations presented in this Report, to further explore the issue of the differential between “declared” wealth and “real well-being” in our Country, adopting an empirical approach and formulating an analytical model based on: the collection and systematisation of 13 regional and provincial socio-economic context variables, the indexing of the individual variables under investigation, the calculation of the differential between the proxy indicators of “declared” wealth (per capita GDP and household disposable income) and the average of the proxy indicators of well-being. Negative values of the differential correspond to a real wealth that is higher than the declared wealth and, therefore, to a more or less high level of the shadow economy.