Willing to Pay? The Politics of Engendering Faith in the Post-Communist Romanian Tax System

Although the Romanian institutional landscape and its policies have dramatically improved since the 1990s, the low institutional capacity of its tax system remains mysteriously constant, despite continued efforts at improvement in this area and the fact that experimental data show that Romanians have apparently high tax morale. This puzzling situation is tackled in this chapter by detailing the institutional legacies upon which the post-Communist tax system has been built and tracing the evolution of tax policies over a quarter of a century within the context of post-Communist transformations. The chapter offers a nuanced explanation based on a combination of policy inadequacy and instability, tax evasion and corruption, and low spending on infrastructure, all of which limit the chances of creating an adequate legitimacy for the tax system