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 effect of governance quality on tax revenue mobilisation in Africa using instrumental variables (IV) estimation to address endogeneity concerns. The findings reveal that higher levels of political participation, such as freedom to join political parties, voting, and democratic preference, are significantly associated with increased tax revenue. Tax compliance, captured by trust in tax authorities and the perceived difficulty of avoiding taxes, also enhances revenue mobilisation. While difficulty in accessing education and security services is linked to lower tax revenue, the effect of healthcare access is less consistent. Additionally, institutional trusts correlate positively with tax revenue, suggesting that credible institutions foster voluntary tax compliance. These results highlight the importance of strengthening governance quality to support effective tax policy and improve revenue outcomes. Policymakers should focus on enhancing civic engagement, improving public service delivery, and building institutional trust to bolster domestic resource mobilisation across African countries.

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.