The Vologda Oblast is one of the first regions in the Russian Federation which has formed a complex system of countermeasures against the informal economy: from the methods of the estimation of the informal sector size and the decomposition of informal employment from a perspective of activities and municipalities to the regulatory consolidation of main definitions such as “shadow economy”, “informal employment” in the regional documents of enforcement. The article presents main methodological approaches to the assessment of the shadow economy and informal employment that are based on the official statistical and departmental data taking into account expert, macroeconomic, and correlation indicators. The proposed approach can be recommended for the practical activity of public and municipal authorities. The database and the procedure of the proposed methods can be considered as a form of the monitoring of the shadow economy in the region
Keywords
regional economy, the shadow economy, shadow sector, non-observed economy, informal employment, illegal entrepreneurship, diagnosing and monitoring of the shadow economy