Quality of public governance and voluntary tax payment: experimental evidence from Indonesia

ABSTRACT

Taxpayers tend to have an aversion to taxes because they often feel that they lack information about how their taxes are being spent. By conducting a vignette survey experiment with the Indonesian taxpayers, we demonstrate that citizens are more likely to perceive their tax obligations favourably if they are exposed to information that the government is acting in a trustworthy manner. This result suggests that a government’s commitment to establishing good governance in tax revenue management can increase public confidence, which can be an important determinant of people’s tax attitudes. Our study provides new empirical evidence on the impact of psychological ties between citizens and the government on citizens’ willingness to pay taxes.

KEYWORDS:

• Tax paying behaviours
• public governance
• survey experiment
• willingness to pay tax

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• C93
• D64
• H11
• H29
• H31

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Notes

¹ See S1 in the supplementary materials for the details of the vignette’s design.

² We excluded some categories of taxpayers. See S2 in the supplementary materials for detailed information about these categories.

³ See S2 in the supplementary materials for the additional explanation of the data.

⁴ See S3 in the supplementary materials for the details of the results.

⁵ See S4 in the supplementary materials for the robustness checks.