Belgium FPS Finance Publishes Article on How to Improve Tax Compliance in the Journal of Political Economy

Adrienn Juhász's picture
Published by:

Recently, the Belgian FPS Finance’s work on Behavioral Insights and Tax Compliance has been published in the Journal of Political Economy. In "How to Improve Tax Compliance? Evidence from Population-Wide Experiments in Belgium", Belgian colleagues and academics report on the findings of 4 natural field experiments on taxpayer behavior over the course of three fiscal years 2014-2016.

 

The key results are:

  • Simplifying communication raises tax compliance,
  • Deterrence has an additional positive effect,
  • Invoking tax morale is not effective and often backfires,
  • Simplification is far more cost-effective than standard enforcement measures.

 

This scientific publication is the outcome of a fruitful collaboration between the Belgian Tax Administration (Behavioral Insights Unit) and a team of behavioral economists; Jan-Emmanuel De Neve (University of Oxford), Johannes Spinnewijn (London School of Economics), Clément Imbert and Teodora Tsankova (both at Warwick University). A good example of academic-practitioner collaboration that enables evidence-based policymaking.

You can download the article by clicking here. Colleagues who want more information can contact [email protected]