Shadow economy is an inevitable part of any economic system in the world. It exists everywhere and governments have always been trying to understand the mechanisms of its functionality, to avoid its spreading deeper into the economic structures of countries, but it seems that different results have been achieved in different regions.

Russia is well-known as one of the young market countries with a largest share of shadow economy at the same time. Especially after the collapse of the Soviet Union the level of shadow economy in the newly emerged capitalistic Russia rocketed immediately. Russian government has been trying to cope with the situation with legislative measures, so far achieving quite formal results, not influencing the general situation on the large scale, bringing a serious menace to lose the credibility of our external economic partners. Business communities encounter lots of obstacles during their set up and development processes due to the large stake of shadow economy principles.

Most discussions on the subject offer little alternative to the current situation. It is logic and useful to adopt the experience of the European Union in the area of overcoming shadow economy problems.

The strategic aims of the project are to contribute to development of mutual understanding between the EU and Russian academic and business societies, to overcome difficulties and contradictions in perception of each other’s experience, to develop intercultural communications and comparative evaluation of similarities and differences of views from European and Russian experts in the field of shadow economy, and to foster the constructive dialogue between the academic world, business community and policy-makers.

Main project objective: development and introduction into the educational process of a Russian HEI (University) of a special teaching module that would allow the future professionals to form the knowledge about forms, mechanisms, character and levels of internal/external threats from the shadow economy sector in Russia, as well as about the possibilities of application in Russia of basic principles and fundamentals of European policy of effective countermeasures against shadow economy, based on the studies of practical EU experience.