IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/arx/papers/2603.06098.html

The Widening Gap in Tax Attitudes: Role of Government Trust in the post COVID-19 period

Author

Listed:
  • Eiji Yamamura
  • Fumio Ohtake

Abstract

This study investigates shifts in acceptable tax rate for reducing inequality during the COVID-19 pandemic using Japanese data. We find a transition from norm-based, unconditional support for redistribution to conditional altruism. Before the pandemic, support remained high and independent of institutional trust. The pandemic generated an overall decline in altruistic attitudes while increasing their dependence on trust in government, particularly among high-income individuals. This "widening gap" implies that in post-crisis societies, the social contract is no longer anchored in stable social norms but increasingly relies on institutional trust to sustain income redistribution from the rich to the poor.

Suggested Citation

  • Eiji Yamamura & Fumio Ohtake, 2026. "The Widening Gap in Tax Attitudes: Role of Government Trust in the post COVID-19 period," Papers 2603.06098, arXiv.org.
    • Handle: RePEc:arx:papers:2603.06098
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.06098
    File Function: Latest version
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:arx:papers:2603.06098. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: arXiv administrators (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://arxiv.org/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.