Sunday, December 7, 2014

CfP: Multiple moralities and shadow economies in post-socialism: debating positive and negative incentives to tackle the informal economy

Marie Curie/IAPP Summer School: Zagreb 29 August " 1 September 2015
Call for applicants

In recent years, growing attention has been paid to fighting, or at
least controlling, incomes that are hidden from or unregistered by,
the state for tax, social security and/or labour law purposes.
Starting from the assumption that such non-compliance is not some
minority practice (according to an OECD report, of the global working
population of some three billion, nearly two-thirds - 1.8 billion -
work in the informal economy, see Jütting and Laiglesia, 2009) and
pushed by the need for governments to gather revenues to face the
economic crisis, the 27 Member States of the European Union (EU-27)
and Norway, as well as the EU Candidate countries, have been
earnestly seeking new policy measures to enable the formalization of
undeclared work (see EIRO, 2005; European Employment Observatory,
2004, 2007; Renooy et al, 2004; Williams and Renooy, 2009, 2013).

Two broad approaches have been distinguished towards undeclared work:
a deterrence approach which seeks to engender compliance by detecting
and punishing non-compliance, and an enabling approach which aims to
encourage compliance by either: preventing businesses or people from
engaging in undeclared work from the outset; providing incentives to
enable the transfer of undeclared work into the declared realm, or
facilitating commitment to ~tax moralityTM (Small Business Council,
2004; Williams and Renooy, 2009).

Conventionally, the deterrence approach was dominant across most
European countries. However, the recent crisis and recalculations of
the advantages of formalisation of informal economies have led to
rethinking the way to deal with undeclared economies. Rather than
seek to eradicate the undeclared economy, it is now becoming more
popular an approach to encourage the formalisation of undeclared
work.

Previous research from the GREY project (http://www.grey-
project.group.shef.ac.uk/) has suggested that the informal economy
may be higher the broader is the gap between individual and state
morality. Our understanding is that where a citizen does not see the
advantage of contributing to state development, or when s/e perceives
the state as unreliable, not giving but only taking, or not giving
enough, they are more likely to leave the game. In this respect,
economic actors may even perceive as oemoral  not contributing to the
state (and thus doing something stigmatised by state morality).
Indeed, there is an increasing amount of work in the informal economy
and the emergence of individual accounts that contrast with a state-
led view on individual morality (see, among others, Van Schendel &
Abrahams, 2005; Wanner, 2005, Morris, 2012; Morris & Polese, 2014;
Polese & Rodgers, 2011).

For this Summer School, we welcome the submission of early stage
researchers with empirically-based papers, based on recent research
by PhD students and early post-docs, as well as theoretically-rich
accounts on the relationship between the formal and the informal
economy, state-citizen dynamics and conflictual moralities.
Contributions may be on (but are not limited to):

Informal, undeclared, shadow, underground and unrecorded economic
activities

Tax evasion and tax non-compliance

Tax morality

Informal economies and governance

Informal economic practices and policy making

Suggestions on how to increase compliance among taxpayers, companies
and stakeholders

Moral foundations and alternative moralities of criminal or illegal
activities

Please submit 200 word abstracts and a short biographical statement
with your current position and affiliation  to:

iapp.summerschool@gmail.com
Deadline for abstract: 15 February 2015

Travel, board and lodging for the selected participants will be
covered by the organisers.

This summer school has been made possible thanks to a generous grant
from the Research Executive Agency of the European Commission (grant
no. 611259)

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