When do people become more willing to pay taxes? The effects of government spending information on the public’s willingness to pay taxes

Abstract

ABSTRACT Governments coordinate people’s various interests through budget allocations for the provision of the public goods and services. In order for governments to maintain their budgetary power, it is important to secure revenues and increase people’s willingness to pay taxes. To understand whether government measures exert any influence on the willingness of individual taxpayers to pay taxes, we conducted a survey experiment that varied the information on the government’s fiscal spending in a vignette experiment. Our results show that while providing information about spending on healthcare and infrastructure development did not change the respondents’ willingness to pay taxes, emphasizing industrial subsidies reduced it significantly. These findings imply that targeting specific groups without careful communication could weaken the reciprocal relationship between the government and the public, thus mitigating taxpayers’ cooperative behavior in terms of tax payment.