> My gut is that two parallel economies is an unstable situation Parallel economies are not only inevitable, they can be long-term stable whenever you can't de

> My gut is that two parallel economies is an unstable situation Parallel economies are not only inevitable, they can be long-term stable whenever you can't deal in some (desirable) goods in the legitimate economy. Black markets are very difficult to root out and always have been. > the shadow-economy would not receive must traction compared to the legitimized one. Depends on how essential the black market is to getting what people view as the essentials of life. In middle-class First World countries, it's pretty marginal, because most salarymen don't really want heroin that badly. In the 1970s Soviet Union, if you didn't trade on the black market you simply could not get certain goods Americans would regard as utterly mundane, such as bananas. The USSR had a horrible time with black markets and goods disappearing from store shelves and being hoarded in peoples' apartments.