Forget China, 'System D' Is World's Second Largest Economy (Infographic)
http://www.zerohedge.com/contributed/forget-china-system-d-worlds-second-largest-economy-infographic
A recent article at Foreign Policy noted that the $10 trillion global black market is now the world’s fastest growing economy, and that in 2009, the OECD concluded that half the world’s workers (almost 1.8 billion people) were employed in the shadow economy.
By 2020, the OECD predicts the shadow economy will employ two-thirds of the world’s workers. This new economy even has a name: ‘System D’.
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Based on an estimate by BusinessWeek, “[G]iven US GDP of $14.26 trillion, the world’s largest, that could still be as much as $1.2 trillion in taxable income that slips through Uncle Sam’s fingers each year."
In fact, shadow economy is part of the contributory factors to the current Euro crisis in the context of reduced government tax revenue and driving up consumer price levels. The IMF study showed in the 21 OECD countries in 1999–2001, Greece and Italy had the largest shadow economies, at 30% and 27% of GDP, respectively. In the middle group were the Scandinavian countries, and at the lower end were the United States and Austria, at 10% of GDP, and Switzerland, at 9%.
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