A Tax by Any Other Name? Conceptions of Taxation and Implications for Research

As taxation has become a prominent issue in international development policy, much research has focused on taxpayers’ perceptions and experiences of taxation using cross-country comparative survey data. However, insufficient attention has been paid to issues related to content validity and the cross-context comparability of tax-related concepts key to analyses of many topics, including relationships between willingness to pay taxes and perceptions of corruption, state legitimacy and public service provision. While serious questions have been raised about the data quality in some quantitative work in African studies, little attention has been given to the specific problems of using cross-country survey data.

We encourage critical reflection concerning the use of tax-related data across diverse contexts. We show that a tax by any other name does not retain the same meaning across contexts. We argue that taxation studies, particularly survey-based research, should be informed by a deeper understanding of the contextual meanings ascribed to taxation. Greater prioritisation of conceptual analysis, mixed methods approaches and local language research will strengthen the measurement and interpretive validity of taxpayer perception data, and enhance understanding of taxpayers’ experience and interactions with tax systems.

Summary of article written by Ane Karoline Bak and Vanessa van den Boogaard and published in the Journal of Modern African Studies.