"Willing to pay?" Tax compliance in Britain and Italy: an experimental analysis

As shown by the recent crisis, tax evasion poses a significant problem for countries such as Greece, Spain and Italy. While these societies certainly possess weaker fiscal institutions as compared to other EU members, might broader cultural differences between northern and southern Europe also help to explain citizens’ (un)willingness to pay their taxes? To address this question, we conduct laboratory experiments in the UK and Italy, two countries which straddle this North-South divide. Our design allows us to examine citizens’ willingness to contribute to public goods via taxes while holding institutions constant. We report a surprising result: when faced with identical tax institutions, redistribution rules and audit probabilities, Italian participants are significantly more likely to comply than Britons. Overall, our findings cast doubt upon “culturalist” arguments that would attribute cross-country differences in tax compliance to the lack of morality amongst southern European taxpayers.

正如近期危机所凸显的那样，逃税问题对希腊、西班牙、意大利等国而言已是严峻挑战。相较于其他欧盟成员国，这些国家的财政制度无疑更为薄弱，那北欧与南欧之间更广泛的文化差异，是否也能解释各国公民纳税意愿的强弱差异呢？为解答这一问题，我们在横跨南北欧文化分界的英国与意大利开展了实验室实验。我们的实验设计能够在维持财政制度不变的前提下，探究公民通过纳税为公共品供给做出贡献的意愿。我们得到了一个令人意外的结论：在税制、再分配规则与稽查概率完全一致的情况下，意大利受试者的纳税遵从率显著高于英国受试者。总体而言，我们的研究结果对"文化主义"论调提出了质疑——这类观点将各国纳税遵从度的差异归因于南欧纳税人的道德缺失。