In this paper we argue that tax enforcement is an additional contextual factor affecting tax morale, one of the most important determinants of tax compliance. By using a unique dataset that merges a representative sample of Italian households with administrative data on tax enforcement, we find...

The European Union�s VAT system has become vulnerable to organised fraud schemes. In recent years, these schemes, undergoing a change in structure, have affected services and imports of goods from third countries and may also have shifted trade in goods among EU countries. Within the EU-27,...

The paper considers several approaches to the measurement of firms� tax burden in order to identify significant indicators for the banking sector. It also analyses features of tax provisions which are peculiar to the Italian system. On these bases, it looks at measures affecting the tax...

The paper summarizes the framework used in a research project on local public services carried out by Bank of Italy researchers. It discusses motivations, characteristics, results and general lessons of the project, whose sector-specific results are detailed in individual papers. The project was...

We contribute to the debate on how to assess the size of the underground or shadow economy with a reinterpretation of the traditional Currency Demand Approach (CDA) � la Tanzi. We introduce three main innovations. First, we take as dependent variable in the money demand equation a direct...

The Italian administrative system is currently perceived as one of the main obstacles to a higher growth of the productive system. We argue that some causes of this ineffectiveness are deeply rooted and date back at the unification: a missing strong administrative tradition; an (excessive)...

This paper examines the creation of some new provinces in Italy in the 1990s to assess whether the reduction in the size of the local jurisdiction led to benefits in terms of local development, human capital and road quality, which are three public goods provided by the Italian provinces in...

In this paper we use data from the Bank of Italy�s Survey on Household Income and Wealth (SHIW) to study what Italian households think of tax evasion, and to estimate their propensity to evade taxes. This propensity turns out to be larger for the self-employed than for employees; within the...

Tax evasion is a widespread phenomenon and encouraging tax compliance is an important and much debated policy issue. Many studies have shown that tax cheating has to be attributed to a considerable extent to the tax morale of taxpayers. The aim of the present paper is to shed light on the...

The paper surveys different approaches to the estimation of the underground economy. First, the focus is on the methodologies adopted by the Italian and French Statistical Institutes, respectively based on the exhaustive estimate of the labour input and on tax compliance data. Secondly, we...