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Bangladesh, June 22 -- Shamsul Huq Zahid
The finance division of the government has come out with magic figures for the size of country's shadow or black or underground or grey or clandestine or parallel - one has every liberty to give it a name which one deems fit - economy.
According to the 'analysis' made by the division, the country's shadow economy in the year 2010 was equivalent to a size lying somewhere in between 45 per cent and 81 per cent of its gross domestic product (GDP) for that year.
The division prefers to call the estimates (or guesstimates) as projections. If the projections were true, the country's a shadow economy was, roughly, worth more than $ 50 billion or $100 billion in 2010.
The reasons for the projections, made through the econometric analysis which, reportedly, used Currency-Demand Approach, varying very widely remains unexplained. The analyses of shadow economies of many other developed and developing countries made earlier had never varied so wildly. Those usually varied between 4.0 per cent and 20 per cent in most cases.
In fact there is no uniform or one-size-fits-all formula for measuring the size of the shadow economy of a country, nor is there a precise definition of shadow economy. A number of economists are of the opinion that in the absence of concept...