Estimating the size of informal economy in a post-transition country - the case of Poland

The size of the informal economy in Poland is estimated by means of the Currency Demand Approach (CDA). Using quarterly data for the period 1999-2019, we adopt two separate econometric approaches. First, we specify a single equation model to estimate it with the Fully-Modified OLS method. Second, the CDA coefficients are treated as a cointegrating vector in a cointegrated VAR. The size of the informal economy in Poland is found to have diminished from about 32% of GDP in 2000 to about 12% of GDP in 2019. We provide confidence intervals for our estimates which, to our best knowledge, are rarely presented in the literature; their width ranges from 3 to 7% of GDP.