Informality, Innovation, and Aggregate Productivity Growth

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: This paper investigates how the ability to innovate affects firms' decisions to operate informally and the aggregate consequences of their sectoral choice. I embed a sectoral choice model, where firms choose to operate in the formal or informal economy, into a richer general equilibrium environment to analyze the aggregate effects of firm-level decisions in response to government taxation. I calibrate the model and conduct simulations to quantify the impacts on the aggregate economy. I find that a change in tax rates from 50% to 60% leads to a 20.9% reduction in the size of the formal sector. This change is accompanied by a 0.07 percentage point reduction in TFP growth per year. Given that countries like Mali, Mexico, and Sri Lanka impose total tax rates near 50%, these findings have significant and applicable policy implications across a broad range of lesser developed countries. Even at lower tax rates, for instance 10%, a 10% increase, decreases the size of the formal sector by more than 7.7%.

Keywords: Informality; Innovation; Productivity Growth; TFP (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H32 O17 O31 O41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014-05-28, Revised 2016-02-26
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dge, nep-ino, nep-iue and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/69647/1/MPRA_paper_69647.pdf original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Informality, innovation, and aggregate productivity growth (2020)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:69647

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().