Research Interests:
European Union has introduced an explicit obligation for all member states that the official GDP data need to include the estimation of the underground economy, resulting from statistical or economic reasons. For this purpose, the... more
European Union has introduced an explicit obligation for all member states that the official GDP data need to include the estimation of the underground economy, resulting from statistical or economic reasons. For this purpose, the so-called Eurostat Exhaustiveness programme has been developed for the group of candidate countries, ten of which have become full members as of the 1st of May 2004. In line with the results of this programme, the new EU members include the correction for the value of the underground economy into their official GDP figure. With the inclusion of underground economy, the consequent value of Croatian GDP per capita, measured according to the purchasing power parity, reduces the gap in comparison to the EU-25. Furthermore, the proportion of total expenditures in GDP of the general government sector is reduced as well, which places Croatia below the NMS-8 country average. In terms of the Maastricht convergence criteria, the underground economy inclusion procedu...