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