The goal of this study is to examine the literature on shadow economy and regional shadow economy in the context of digitalization and sustainable development. From a methodological perspective, the Web of Science database is used for the search of documents about “informal economy”, “underground economy”, “regional informal economy”, and “regional underground economy” between 1992 and 2023. The bibliometric analysis is conducted using the Biblioshiny and Bibliometrix packages from R, which provide information and visualizations on authors, keywords, papers, journals, and topic analysis. The results reveal a notable increase in documents within both overall and regional-level informal economy literature in 2016, coinciding with the formulation of the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), aimed at reducing inequalities and fostering inclusive economic growth, with a peak in 2021 driven by the COVID-19 pandemic, accelerating the digital transformation process and uncovering distinct patterns in the informal economy landscape. Moreover, during the last years, the literature on both the general shadow economy and regional aspects has placed growing emphasis on digitalization and sustainable development related themes, such as digital economy, financial development, innovation, e-waste, impact and globalization.