IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/idq/ictduk/14364.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Teach to Comply? Evidence from a Taxpayer Education Programme in Rwanda

Author

Listed:
  • Mascagni, Giulia
  • Santoro, Fabrizio
  • Mukama, Denis

Abstract

The role of taxpayer education in improving tax compliance has been largely unexplored in the literature. This paper starts to fill this gap by providing the first rigorous evaluation of the effectiveness of taxpayer education on knowledge, perceptions, and compliance, which took place in Rwanda. Our analysis is based on a unique dataset that combines administrative and survey data. We show that taxpayer education results in significant and large increases in knowledge, which starts from a very low level at baseline, and that it contributes to improving compliance behaviour. Our strongest result is that training new taxpayers helps bring them into the habit of filing tax declarations – an obligation many fail to comply with. In terms of policy, our results show that the benefits of taxpayer education go beyond increased revenue in the short term, and include building a habit of tax compliance.

Suggested Citation

  • Mascagni, Giulia & Santoro, Fabrizio & Mukama, Denis, 2019. "Teach to Comply? Evidence from a Taxpayer Education Programme in Rwanda," Working Papers 14364, Institute of Development Studies, International Centre for Tax and Development.
    • Handle: RePEc:idq:ictduk:14364
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://opendocs.ids.ac.uk/opendocs/handle/20.500.12413/14364
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Dong, Sarah Xue & Sinning, Mathias, 2022. "Trying to Make a Good First Impression: A Natural Field Experiment to Engage New Entrants to the Tax System," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), Elsevier, vol. 100(C).
    2. Santoro, Fabrizio, 2021. "To file or not to file? Another dimension of tax compliance - the Eswatini Taxpayers’ survey," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), Elsevier, vol. 95(C).
    3. Vanessa van den Boogaard & Wilson Prichard & Rachel Beach & Fariya Mohiuddin, 2022. "Enabling tax bargaining: Supporting more meaningful tax transparency and taxpayer engagement in Ghana and Sierra Leone," Development Policy Review, Overseas Development Institute, vol. 40(1), January.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Economic Development; Governance;

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    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:idq:ictduk:14364. 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: CATS administrator (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.ids.ac.uk/project/international-centre-for-tax-and-development .

    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.