Determining Effective Factors on Tax Evasion using the Method of Meta-Analysis Abstract

Abstract

Taxes as one of the economic policy tools reduce the welfare of taxpayers gradually, which leads them to avoid paying taxes, either legally or illegally and it has caused a drastic and worrying reduction in government revenue through taxes. Tax evasion phenomena is one of the essential economic problems in developing countries incloding Iran increasingly. Also, misalignment and asymmetric information of tax system of the countries about the causes of tax evasion can be added to expand it. Identifying the factors that cause tax evasion is very effective in preventing it and helping to estimate the amount of tax evasion in the community. There have been studies on the causes of tax evasion in recent years in different approach. In this paper, the meta-analysis approach has been used to determine the factors affecting tax evasion and the severity of their relationship with tax evasion for Iran. The results showed that variables such as economic factors, per capita income, technology factors, social factors, legal factors, inflation, cultural factors, trade restriction, tax burden, unemployment and government volume are factors that influence tax evasion and the cultural factors have the highest impact on tax evasion and the income per capita has the lowest impact. Factors affecting tax evasion, respectively, the most effective and their correlation coefficient are cultural factors (0.577), legal factors (0.543), social factors (0.539) and economic factors (0.467), volume Government (0.399), trade restrictions (0.392), inflation (0.367), unemployment (0.357), tax burden (0.241), technology factors (0.194) and per capita income (0.192).

Keywords

• tax avoidance
• tax evasion
• meta-analysis method
• iran