There's a Gigantic Black Hole in the Middle of Israel's Economy
What’s the real scope of Israel's unreported economic activity? Has COVID made it worse?
The senior personnel in the Finance Ministry weren’t especially fond of the previous minister, Yisrael Katz (Likud). Some of them even made fun of him among themselves – for example, following a meeting with the ministry’s management, when he sought to understand an odd phenomenon he’d noticed. It turned out that a members of a vocation that was seemingly especially hard hit by the COVID-19 lockdowns in 2020 – namely taxi drivers, many of them Likud supporters – had told Katz that they were actually very pleased with the government’s policy of extensive grants. Well, obviously, the senior officials thought: The taxi drivers enjoyed the best of all possible worlds. They received the grants, but some of them apparently went on working and earning money that they didn’t report.
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