Which is the Best Government? Colligating Tax Compliance and Citizens’ Insights RegardIng Authorities’ Actions

Abstract

The current paper focuses primarily on taxpayers’ perceptions regarding government performance (viz., transparency, taxation level, goods and services provided, political stability) and explores how these perceptions impact on tax compliance when trust in government counts as a mediating variable. To this end we conduct-ed four mediation analyses on a sample pool of 182 countries and territories with data commissioned by international organizations, i.e., World Bank and World Economic Forum. By means of the bootstrapping technique with 95% bias-cor-rected and accelerated (BCa) confdence interval and 5000 bootstrap resamples, we substantiate the idea that citizens’ tax compliance behavior is steered by their level of trust in government which is triggered by the manner they perceive government performance in levying taxes and re-distributing wealth. A prescription stemming from this upshot is that governments should extensive-ly enhance visibility of their policy achievements in order to secure citizens’ trust, collect proper levels of tax revenues, whence consolidate and maintain economic prosperity as well as social and political balance on the long run.