What do Italians think about tax evasion?

Giovanni D’Alessio ()
Additional contact information
Giovanni D’Alessio: Banca d'Italia
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Giovanni D'Alessio

No 607, Questioni di Economia e Finanza (Occasional Papers) from Bank of Italy, Economic Research and International Relations Area

Abstract: The paper shows the opinions on taxes of Italian citizens based on data gathered in four different national surveys between 1992 and 2013. Through a Principal Component Analysis, the study constructs a synthetic indicator of the propensity to evade, examining its intensity across various social groups and its evolution over time. The results show that the propensity to evade taxes is greater among households whose heads have low levels of education and income, are elderly and are resident in the South. Over time, the propensity to evade taxes has been growing on average, especially in the North, which has reduced the gap compared with the South, and among young people under 30 years old. The paper also shows a link between the propensity for tax evasion and some indicators of actual evasion, such as the use of cash and the under-reporting behaviour in the Survey of Household Income and Wealth (SHIW) conducted by the Bank of Italy, confirming the association between cultural elements and evasion behaviour.

Keywords: tax evasion; social norms; social capital (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A13 H26 Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cwa, nep-iue, nep-pbe and nep-pub
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.bancaditalia.it/pubblicazioni/qef/2021-0607/QEF_607_21.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bdi:opques:qef_607_21

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Questioni di Economia e Finanza (Occasional Papers) from Bank of Italy, Economic Research and International Relations Area Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().