Perceptions of institutional quality and justification of tax evasion

According to the world values survey, citizens justification of tax evasion varies widely across individuals and countries. We explore in this paper how justification of tax evasion covaries across individuals and countries with measures of government quality and the survey respondents own perceptions of the institutional quality. We study three proxies for individuals assessment of institutional quality, namely confidence in government, in civil service and in justice. We find only weak evidence that better assessments of the quality of government institutions are associated with less justification of tax evasion.