Trust and Tax Morale in
Abstract: Recent literature has been showing that conditional cooperation is essential for tax compliance. Only coercion mechanisms could not explain the willingness of people to pay tax. On the other hand enforcement costs of tax payments would be excessive high if governments depend only on coercion to collect. Based on the literature on tax morale and conditional cooperation this paper analyzes one crucial point on this discussion, which is the relationship between tax morale and perceptions on government response to tax payments and voice in Latin American and Caribbean countries. The data utilized came from Latinobarometro 2005, which is a survey carried on for several years in all LAC countries. The survey presents many useful questions concerning perception on tax morale. The results obtained show that there is a strong correlation between tax morale and the perception that money collected is well spend and voice. On the other hand the perception on being caught for not paying tax does not affect tax morale. Also demographic variables were important to the explanation of tax morale. These results show that there are some differences between LAC tax morale determinants pattern and the patterns observed in other regions of the world.
