Digital Shadow Economy: a Critical Review of the Literature

Abstract

One of the biggest problems of the last decade is hardly defined economic activities, objects and subjects in cyber space. Through cyberspaces, such as social networking platforms, e-commerce, e-business systems or cyber computer games, real money circulates but in most cases these transactions are not accounted and do not generate the taxes to the state budget. For this reason, a deeper insight in the phenomenon of digital shadow economy is purposeful. The performed analysis of various scientific sources leads to the conclusion that the previous research on the topic of digital shadow economy is mostly limited with the studies in cybercriminal activities, e-fraud and the motives of the consumers to get involved in digital piracy. However, the complex scientific research in the field of digital shadow economy has not been performed, which determined the aim of this research – to systematize the scientific literature on digital shadow economy and perform the critical analysis of the researched phenomenon. The methods used in the research include systematic and comparative analysis of the scientific literature. The research has enabled to specify the concept of digital shadow economy, identify its forms and activity channels in digital black markets and define the differences between traditional and digital shadow economy.

DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2015.v6n6s5p402