Internet and tax reform in developing countries

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This article investigates whether greater access to the Internet influences tax reform in developing countries. Tax reform entails here the change of the tax structure in favour of domestic tax revenue, and at the expense of international trade tax revenue. The analysis has used an unbalanced panel dataset of 102 developing countries over the period 1995-2015. The empirical exercise, based on the two-step system Generalized Methods of Moments (GMM), shows that the rise in the Internet usage is associated with a higher extent of tax reform in developing countries. Specifically, low-income countries enjoy a higher positive effect of the Internet access on tax reform, compared to other groups of countries. Furthermore, the positive effect of the Internet usage on the extent of tax reform increases as countries' degree of openness to international trade rises.