Public Attitudes Toward Tax Evasion and Redistribution: Evidence from Five Euro-Asian Countries

This study explored two public finance questions – attitude toward the justifiability of tax evasion, and whether it is a legitimate function of government to tax the rich and subsidize the poor. It also compared the relative quality of three artificial intelligence chat bots – Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini and DeepSeek. The three chat bots were asked to list countries that are both in Europe and Asia. They all listed the same five countries – Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Russia and Turkey. One of the bots merely listed the countries and gave a few additional words, while the other two bots volunteered additional information. The bots were then asked to summarize the views toward the justifiability of tax evasion in each country, and to provide citations to the sources they used to arrive at their conclusion. The length of their responses varied somewhat. All of their replies provided good summaries and were grammatically correct. The sources listed were different in each case. The World Values Survey data for the five countries was then examined on the issue of the justifiability of tax evasion to determine the relative overall views of each country. Additional comparisons were made of gender views and views by age to determine if either demographic variable was significant. There were significant differences in some cases. Another World Values Survey question examined the issue of whether taxing the rich and subsidizing the poor constituted an essential characteristic of democracy in the minds of the people in those five Euro-Asian countries. An overall comparison was made for the five countries. Additional comparisons were also made by gender and age to learn whether any differences in these two demographic variables were significant. This study makes several contributions to the literature. Although attitude toward the justifiability of tax evasion has been studied numerous times, the present study is the first to compare attitudes in the five Euro-Asian countries on this issue. Likewise, although a few studies have been made on the idea that taxing the rich and subsidizing the poor should or should not be an essential characteristic of a democracy, this study is the first to examine and compare the views of the people in the five Euro-Asian countries. The present study is one of the few to compare the relative quality of chat bots and is perhaps the first to make a comparison of Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini and DeepSeek. The conclusions are that all three chat bots performed well, although it would be a subjective judgment on the part of the author to determine which chat bot did the best or worst job of responding to the instructions; an examination of the two tax questions that were included in the World Values Survey database determined that there were some significant differences between the views of the five countries both for attitude toward the justifiability of tax evasion and for the view that taxing the rich and subsidizing the poor constituted an essential function of a democracy. Some differences based on gender and age were also found.