An Empirical Study of Attitudes Toward the Ethics of Tax Evasion in Mali

Abstract:     
Most studies on tax evasion have taken either an economics or public finance perspective. Not many studies have investigated tax evasion from the perspective of ethics. One exception is a 1944 doctoral dissertation by Martin Crowe (1944), a Catholic priest who examined the Christian (mostly Catholic) theological and philosophical literature of the past 500 years. His study identified a number of arguments that have been used to justify tax evasion over the centuries.

The present study used a survey instrument that includes 15 of those historical arguments, plus 3 newer arguments, and distributed it to a group of Executive MBA students in Mali, a country in West Africa to determine the extent of support for the various arguments that have been made over the past 500 years using a seven-point Likert scale. The arguments are then ranked from strongest to weakest. This study replicates the studies listed in the references section.

Number of Pages in PDF File: 10

Keywords: ethics, tax evasion, Mali, gender, Africa

JEL Classification: D6, E62, H26, J16, K34, K42, M14, M4, O55

working papers series