YEREVAN, February 7, /ARKA/. A recent study by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) titled, 'Shadow Economies Around the World: What Did We Learn Over the Last 20 Years?’ estimates Armenia’s informal (shadow) economy at 36% of its overall GDP.

According to the study, the average share of Armenia’s informal economy in 1991-2015 was 42.59% of GDP, falling to 35.96% in 2015. The share of the informal economy began to slowly decline from 2011 to below 40%.

Of the regional countries, the lowest informal economy is boasted by Iran (18.38%). In Turkey, it is 27.43% of GDP, in Azerbaijan - 43.66% and in Georgia - 53.07%.

The lowest informal economy across the globe was in Switzerland (6.94%), followed by the United States (7%), Germany (7.75%), the Netherlands (7.83%), Austria (8.1%) and Japan (8%). The highest was in Zimbabwe (67%) and Haiti (56.38%).

“The shadow economy includes all economic activities which are hidden from official authorities for monetary, regulatory, and institutional reasons. It reflects mostly legal economic and productive activities that, if recorded, would contribute to national GDP,” the IMF said.

The average size of the shadow economy of the surveyed 158 countries over 1991 to 2015 is 31.9 percent. The authors of the paper used new methods, especially the new macro method, Currency Demand Approach (CDA) and Multiple Indicators Multiple Causes (MIMIC) in a structured hybrid-model based estimation procedure. -0-