The influence of demographic factors and risk aversion on tax morale: A multi-group analysis

Abstract

Tax morale has been recognized as the key to understand the levels of compliance achieved in most countries. We applied a structural equation model (SEM) to gain a better understanding about the factors shaping tax morale of Portuguese taxpayer’s. Our purpose was to analyse through SEM the direct effects of political democratic system, political participation, religiosity, individual satisfaction, trust in others and institutional trust on tax morale. SEM of tax morale allowed us to analyse the impact of demographic variables and risk aversion as determinants of tax morale through the use of multi-group analysis of structural invariance of SME developed. A sample of 1,553 Portuguese individual’s representative of Portuguese population obtained from European Values Study (EVS, 2010) was used. The results confirmed that Portuguese taxpayers tax morale is influenced by taxpayers trust on institutions like government, parliament and the judicial system, by political participation and by the belief that democracy is a good political system for governing the country. Tax morale is also influenced by individual s satisfaction, by religiosity and by societal behaviour (trust in others). © 2013 European Journal of Research on Education by IASSR.