Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
Mali Çözüm, cilt.31, sa.163, ss.93-122, 2021 (Hakemli Dergi)
Debates in the field of public fiscal-management assert that tax morale
is at least as essential as punishments and enforcements for fulfilling the tax
obligations. Especially, the absence of individuals with high tendency for
evading taxes in countries where tax audits and punishments are relatively
low, implies the presence of a positive social-capital effect on individuals in
the society they live. The tax morale and its tax compliance outcome, which
are shaped by value judgements that are transferred from the past to future
in a society, are closely related with the quality of the social capital stock
of that society. Within this framework, this study aims at exploring how
trust, an essential ingredient of social capital, affects the tax morale. In the
study, with respect to this objective, cross-section regression estimations are
carried out across countries by using the data from the World Values Survey,
which is conducted to thousands of people in 60 countries. In these regression
estimations, various quantitative indicators with different contents are used
for measuring the level of trust in each of the countries. As a result of these
estimations, tax morale is found to be high in countries where individuals’
trust to the governmental system and to each other are high. This implies that
trust, which is a type of social capital transferred institutionally in a society
from the past to the present, is a factor that encourages the voluntary tax
compliance beside the coercive precautions taken by governments to increase
the tax compliance.