Paper long abstract:

Paper Long abstract: Informality and shadow transactions have been acknowledged as a main component of a large amount of companies operating in post-socialist spaces (Polese 2014; Putnins and Sauka 2015; Schneider 2013; Williams 2016). Little is known, however, on the reasons why companies prefer to remain in the shadow; the relationship between informality, informal practices and performance.

The main goal of this paper is to present the results of the SHADOW survey (Marie Curie RISE project - 2018 - 2022) conducted in five countries of the former USSR (between January and March 2019): Georgia, Russia, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan).

We scale up the Baltic Managers Survey used to calculate the shadow economy index in the Baltics (Putnis and Sauka 2015) to three post-Soviet regions to explore: 1) the correlation between the institutional (and macro-economic) environment and the likelihood of a company to engage in informal transactions; 2) the main alleged motivations by company managers to justify this behaviour. In turn, this will allow us to engage with the theorization of informal practices in a cross-country and cross-regional perspective and how they can be interpreted and taken advantage of in public policy perspective