The Shadow Economy and Ideas of Freedom

This article highlights the debates and policies on informal work that resonated publicly in the FRG and beyond in the 1970s and 1980s.Indeed, it is remarkable and little known that during this period, as the debates about the shadow economy in the FRG and other Western industrial countries took shape, informal economic activities were often regarded as rational, reasonable, and effective.Influential voices from the political elite, the social sciences, and the media portrayed work in the shadow economy in a rather positive light and connected it to ideas and visions of entrepreneurial and individual freedom, while existing labour conditions and labour markets were frequently criticized as insufficiently flexible.Advocates of neoliberalism, in particular, referred to both notions of freedom and unfreedom of labour when they discussed the political implications of informal work.Promoters of alternative economies drew on similar ideas, albeit with different political visions in mind, when they depicted their imagined future of work.Quite different political forces thus considered so-called free wage labour less free than various forms of informal work

Economic system · Economics · Economy · Keynesian economics · Political economy · Political science · Psychology · Taxation and Compliance Studies

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