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Tax avoidance, tax evasion, and tax flight: Do legal differences matter?

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Abstract

Although from an economic point of view, legal considerations apart, tax avoidance, tax evasion and tax flight have similar effects, namely a reduction of revenue yields, and are based on the same desire to reduce the tax burden, it is likely that individuals perceive them as different and as unequally fair. Overall, 252 fiscal officers, business students, business lawyers, and entrepreneurs produced spontaneous associations to a scenario either describing tax avoidance, tax evasion, or tax flight, and evaluated it as positive, neutral or negative. The results indicate that social representations differ with respect to tax avoidance, tax evasion, and tax flight. Tax evasion was perceived rather negatively, tax flight neutrally, and tax avoidance positively. Tax knowledge was found not to be correlated neither with tax avoidance nor with tax evasion.

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  • Friedrich Schneider & Erich Kirchler & Boris Maciejovsky, 2001. "Tax avoidance, tax evasion, and tax flight: Do legal differences matter?," Economics working papers 2001-04, Department of Economics, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria.
    • Handle: RePEc:jku:econwp:2001_04
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    Cited by:

    1. Aleksandar Stulhofer & Ivan Rimac, 2002. "Opportunism, Institutions and Moral Costs: the Socio-Cultural Dimension of the Underground Economy in Croatia 1995-1999," Occasional paper series 14, Institute of Public Finance.
    2. Friedrich Schneider, 2012. "The Shadow Economy and Tax Evasion: What Do We (Not) Know?," CESifo Forum, ifo Institute - Leibniz Institute for Economic Research at the University of Munich, vol. 13(2), pages 03-12, July.

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    tax evasion; social representations; tax knowledge;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • H26 - Public Economics - - Taxation, Subsidies, and Revenue - - - Tax Evasion and Avoidance
    • K34 - Law and Economics - - Other Substantive Areas of Law - - - Tax Law
    • K42 - Law and Economics - - Legal Procedure, the Legal System, and Illegal Behavior - - - Illegal Behavior and the Enforcement of Law

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