Estimation of the Underground Economy in Quebec
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The main purpose of this paper is to estimate the size and the growth of Quebec’s underground economy, and the corresponding loss of taxes for the government. Our approach is based on a method developed by Pissarides and Weber [1989] and extended by Lyssiotou et al. [2004]. The basic hypothesis is that an individual can under-report his earnings from self-employment but not from paid work, upon which taxes are directly levied. We estimate a consumer demand system where the marginal propensity to consume is allowed to vary with the two types of earnings. We next estimate the size of the self-employment earnings that are under-reported. From this estimate, we calculate a relative size for the underground economy in Quebec. We use the data from Statistics Canada’s Survey of Household Expenditures. According to our results, Quebec’s underground economy amounted to 4.6% of GDP in 1997 and increased to 5.7% in 2002. For the government, this represents as much as $ 3.3 billions in forgone taxes for 2002 alone. Classification JEL: D12, E26, H26.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".