Conference Agenda

The study focused on assessing the level of tax compliance in South Africa and what factors explain the level of compliance.World Values Survey data on South Africa were used to assess the tax side of fiscal policy, how taxpayers’ response to the policy affects compliance and what matters for compliance.Descriptive statistics and an ordered logistic model were employed on longitudinal data.The study revealed that the perceptions, attitudes and behaviours of South African taxpayers have generally shifted from a society that values tax compliance to a nation that justifies tax evasion. The main factors that shape perception and behaviour towards tax compliance are demographic factors, the level of confidence in the government and patriotism. The study recommends considering cognitive and behavioral factors when designing and communicating tax policies to better fit South Africa's unique socio-economic landscape and finance public service delivery.

We explore how teaching basic taxes to future taxpayers helps build the tax culture under low capacity. We use novel randomized survey experiments embedded into a large tax awareness campaign towards young adults in Cameroon. We randomly assigned 1962 public and private secondary school students from 42 classes to tax informational treatments. We provide causal evidence of significant effects on basic tax knowledge and compliance attitudes with differential treatment effects across gender, risk attitudes and family background. Our results also indicate strong effects of the informational treatments for cohorts of students at both tails of the knowledge and tax morale distributions. Interestingly, our findings highlight the high potential for scalability and offer a new perspective on the political economy of tax educational reforms for improved compliance norms towards complying with taxes among younger and potentially entrepreneurial populations.

This paper examines the impact of governance quality on tax revenue mobilization in Africa. It utilizes an instrumental variables approach. Our results indicate that political participation including factors such as political party freedom, voting, democratic preference, elections, and satisfaction with democracy enhances tax revenue mobilization. Also, tax compliance perception significantly fosters tax revenue mobilization, suggesting that as public trust in the tax authorities’ integrity improves, people are more likely to comply with tax obligations, thereby bolstering revenue. Furthermore, public service delivery (access to education, healthcare, and security) has a positive effect on tax revenue mobilization. Institutional trust also strengthens public support for tax policies, amplifying tax revenue mobilization. These findings underscore that the public's perception of governance quality shapes the level of support for tax policies aimed at increasing revenue. Therefore, policymakers must focus on enhancing governance quality to significantly strengthen the tax systems across Africa.

Using data from the latest wave of the Afrobarometer surveys, we examine the heterogeneous effect of corruption perception on tax morale across resource-rich and -poor countries in Africa. We find that perceived levels of corruption among public officials reduces the intrinsic willingness of individuals to pay taxes to the state and the effect is heterogenous across resource-rich and -poor countries in Africa. Specifically, the availability of natural resources (and their exploitation) in a country attenuates the tax morale-reducing effect of corruption perception in Africa. This implies that policies to deepen domestic revenue mobilisation must be context specific.