Incumbency and tax compliance: evidence from Pakistan

Muhammad Sohail Akhtar (), Muhammad Zubair Chishti () and Ahmer Bilal ()
Additional contact information
Muhammad Sohail Akhtar: University of Chakwal
Ahmer Bilal: Zhongnan University of Economics and Law

SN Business & Economics, 2023, vol. 3, issue 3, 1-26

Abstract: Abstract The previous work on political accountability and transparency mainly exists about the voter’s reaction when any negative information is provided about their incumbents. A little bit of work on politicians’ actions to publicly disclose information is available. To the best of my knowledge, there was no study available that simultaneously explores the politician’s actions when they know that their actions are easily accessible by the general public and then the response of voters to their actions. This study tries to fill this gap by examining the behavior of Pakistani politicians towards tax compliance even when they knew that their income tax payments can easily be accessible by individuals and then the response of voters to politicians’ actions in the next general election. Using assets ownership and tax payment data from 2013 to 2017 in the case of Pakistan under the regression as control strategy that was pioneered by George Udny Yule first, we give strong evidence that the members of the ruling parties feel less pressure and are less interested in tax compliance than the member of non-ruling parties and second, voters electorally punish tax cheaters. These results also hold by controlling the other correlating factors, which support our hypothesis that the opposition parties are highly interested to change their status from powerless to becoming powerful and act accordingly.

Keywords: Political accountability; Incumbents; Tax compliance; Ruling party (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s43546-023-00454-z Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:spr:snbeco:v:3:y:2023:i:3:d:10.1007_s43546-023-00454-z

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.springer.com/journal/43546

DOI: 10.1007/s43546-023-00454-z

Access Statistics for this article

SN Business & Economics is currently edited by Gino D'Oca

More articles in SN Business & Economics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().