Recently, several literature reviews have been undertaken in the tax avoidance literature
(Hanlon and Heitzman, 2010; Shackelford and Shevlin, 2001) and tax methodologies
(Gemmell and Hasseldine, 2012). This review offers distinguishing features, as it focuses
only on tax evasion determinants and summarises the related empirical research by
suggesting future research avenues. Several reviews[2] have examined tax evasion. To
the best of our knowledge, this is the first review that attempts to summarise the new
trend of empirical literature dealing with the determinants of tax evasion.
This literature review identifies four categories of tax evasion determinants:
(1) demographic;
(2) cultural and behavioural;
(3) legal and institutional; and
(4) economic.
Besides, it documents that several methods under micro direct and macro indirect
approaches are not used, and tax evasion empirical literature still relies on surveys’
results reported in international reports or on Schneider’s (2004) shadow economy
estimates. Finally, the limited number and the explorative feature of tax evasion studies
reduce the capability to identify apparent determinants.
This literature review intends to serve as a historical record, an introduction for
doctoral students and other interested parties and a guide for identifying important
unresolved issues in the literature. It also contributes to the extant literature by
providing suggestions for future research.
The reminder of this paper is organised as follows. Section 2 presents the theoretical
underpinnings. Section 3 describes the approach used to measure tax evasion. Section 4
reviews and summarises the empirical literature dealing with the determinants of tax
evasion. Finally, Section 5 concludes the paper and provides directions for future
research.