The Household Electricity Approach to measuring the size of the underground economy or black market of a country exploits the presumed relationship between household electrical consumption and a country's GDP. It assumes that undeclared economic activity still needs to use resources, such as electricity, to function. Since electricity consumption is generally well known it can be used as an indicator of economic activity that is not otherwise declared.
The household electricity approach was developed by Maria Lacko as a method to determine the size of the hidden economy in a country. Lacko’s primary focus within this approach was directed at the relationship between the household electrical consumption and Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of a country using regression analysis. Her research in this area was particularly focused on developing methodologies that would help to more accurately determine the prevalence of the hidden economy in transitionary countries such as the former Soviet bloc countries.
Read more about Household Electricity Approach: History, General Concepts, Formula, Advantages, Disadvantages, Criticisms
Famous quotes containing the words household, electricity and/or approach:
“I am an inveterate homemaker, it is at once my pleasure, my recreation, and my handicap. Were I a man, my books would have been written in leisure, protected by a wife and a secretary and various household officials. As it is, being a woman, my work has had to be done between bouts of homemaking.”
—Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973)
“There are two great unknown forces to-day, electricity and woman, but men can reckon much better on electricity than they can on woman.”
—Josephine K. Henry, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 15, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“There is no calm philosophy of life here, such as you might put at the end of the Almanac, to hang over the farmer’s hearth,—how men shall live in these winter, in these summer days. No philosophy, properly speaking, of love, or friendship, or religion, or politics, or education, or nature, or spirit; perhaps a nearer approach to a philosophy of kingship, and of the place of the literary man, than of anything else.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)