Fiscal issues in former Yugoslavian countries

Resumo

This PhD thesis is made of 3 chapters, whose contents were presented at conferences and published as working papers. The first chapter has the aim to analyse fiscal policy in former Yugoslavian countries over the period 2001–2014. The contribution of the chapter is threefold; first, a homogeneous database is built to describe the evolution of the main fiscal aggregates in each country using an identical analytical structure. Second, the composition of national tax revenues is analysed to determine whether common patterns are still present, or if they have evolved in different ways over time. Third, data is pooled to analyse and compute the elasticity of budget imbalance, taxes and expenditure to the output gap. The results show that tax revenue composition is still similar and that the output gap is highly significant in explaining the evolution of both deficit and expenditures over GDP in all countries, but not to account for the evolution of revenues over GDP. The second chapter presents estimates of tax evasion in all former Yugoslavian countries for various years and taxes during the last two decades. The scarcely available fiscal and national accounts data only allow us to provide approximate estimates. Nevertheless, they are a useful contribution to the existing literature in a unique sense since tax evasion is estimated for the very first time for some of the countries. The main aggregate assessment of tax evasion is based on data for shadow economy and tax burden. More specific measures of evasion are provided for some single taxes that are based on data discrepancies from different sources. Lastly, implications are derived for the controls of tax evasion and observed tax collections The third chapter performs an empirical analysis on the determinants of tax morale in former Yugoslavian countries, including both individuals’ attributes and contextual variables. Survey data from the 2008 European Values Study is used as well as fiscal and economic macro-data. The results reveal that the outcomes for individual level variables are in line with the previous scientific literature. Moreover, the results on contextual variables and the interactions associated with tax burden, shadow economy and economic freedom provide new insights concerning tax morale in these countries.