IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/unu/wpaper/wp-2026-58.html

Does global financial transparency improve tax compliance in developing countries?

Author

Listed:
  • Niels Johannesen
  • Lauge Larsen
  • Nadine Riedel

Abstract

In a coordinated effort to curb tax evasion, governments systematically exchange information about bank accounts with foreign owners. We study the compliance effects of the policy in the context of South Africa using information reports on one million foreign bank accounts linked to income and audit data. We find that self-reported foreign income increased sharply and persistently at the onset of information exchange, but remained much below the true foreign income implied by the information reports.

Suggested Citation

  • Niels Johannesen & Lauge Larsen & Nadine Riedel, 2026. "Does global financial transparency improve tax compliance in developing countries?," WIDER Working Paper Series wp-2026-58, World Institute for Development Economic Research (UNU-WIDER).
    • Handle: RePEc:unu:wpaper:wp-2026-58
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.wider.unu.edu/sites/default/files/Publications/Working-paper/PDF/wp2026-58-does-global-financial-transparency-improve-tax-compliance-developing-countries.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    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:unu:wpaper:wp-2026-58. 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: Siméon Rapin (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/widerfi.html .

    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.