Evaluating the individual- and country-level variations in tax morale: Evidence from 35 Eurasian countries

Recently, a small but burgeoning literature has argued that tax non-compliance cannot be fully explained using the conventional rational economic actor approach which views non-compliance as occurring when the pay-off is greater than the expected cost of being caught and punished. Instead, a social actor approach has emerged which views tax non-compliance as higher when ‘tax morale’, defined as the intrinsic motivation to pay taxes, is low. To advance this social actor model, the aim of this paper is to evaluate the individual and national heterogeneity in tax morale, which is crucial if tax compliance is to be improved.