REFAIR

Acronym: REFAIR
Title: Regulating the Grey Zone: Fairness, Informality, and the Boundaries of Work

What is the REFAIR project about, and what challenge does it aim to address?
REFAIR is a Horizon Europe research project that aims to improve our understanding of undeclared and underdeclared work and to develop better policy responses to it. The challenge it addresses is that informal work is usually defined narrowly, as the non-payment of taxes and social security contributions, which overlooks how differently it is understood, justified and regulated from one country to the next. REFAIR moves beyond this narrow view and places ‘fairness’ at the centre of the analysis, examining how laws, working realities and public perceptions interact across diverse European welfare and labour-market systems. In doing so, the project seeks to identify innovative, context-sensitive and sustainable policy responses to a phenomenon that affects workers, public finances and social protection across Europe.. 
 

How will REFAIR improve our understanding of undeclared and under declared work across Europe?
REFAIR builds its analysis around three dimensions of fairness: how laws and policies are designed to regulate and promote formal work; the nature of undeclared work itself, including its scale, patterns and underlying drivers; and how individuals and institutions perceive informal work and the policies that target it. To capture all three, the project uses a robust mixed-methods approach that combines legal analysis, a survey on the prevalence and drivers of un(der)declared work, a survey on public attitudes, and qualitative methods such as in-depth interviews, ethnography and co-designed case studies. This work is carried out in six countries, Austria, Bulgaria, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Poland, chosen to represent diverse welfare and labour-market regimes, which makes it possible to draw genuinely comparative, evidence-based insights rather than isolated national snapshots.. 

What role will VUB play in REFAIR, and what expertise does VUB bring to the consortium?
VUB takes part in REFAIR as a project partner, with the Belgian team led by Prof. Dr. Tuba Bircan and supported by Prof. Christophe Vanroelen. Within the consortium, VUB leads Work Package 2 (‘Methods Foundations’), the methodological backbone of the project, which designs the surveys and research tools that underpin REFAIR’s empirical work. VUB also leads two key methodological tasks: developing a partially synthetic-data and ‘country-twinning’ protocol that uses statistical models calibrated to official data to extend the project’s findings to countries not directly surveyed, and the statistical modelling used to estimate undeclared and underdeclared work in EU member states not covered by the REFAIR Labour Survey. In addition, VUB contributes to the project’s conceptual groundwork and to the design of the REFAIR Labour Survey. This reflects VUB’s recognised expertise in quantitative and computational social science and in statistical data methods, which it brings to bear on one of REFAIR’s central challenges: producing robust, comparable estimates of a phenomenon that is, by its nature, difficult to measure.

What broader impact could REFAIR have on workers, policymakers, and society as a whole?
By placing informal work within wider debates on precarious employment, social protection and economic fairness, REFAIR aims to deliver practical, actionable insights that support more effective, inclusive and equitable labour-market policies across Europe and beyond. A key feature of the project is the active involvement of stakeholders throughout the research process, which helps ensure that the findings are relevant in the real world and draw on the knowledge of practitioners in the field. For workers, this can translate into better-designed protections; for policymakers, into evidence-based and context-sensitive responses; and for society more broadly, into fairer labour markets and stronger social protection systems.