Combating tax evasion – Dina Pomeranz

No modern state can function without effective taxation to fund its roles, ranging from assuring security, rule of law, and infrastructure to providing services in education and health or social programs. Tax evasion not only undermines these efforts, but also leads to distortions in the economy, which can have negative impacts on both economic efficiency and societal fairness.

In this webcast, UBS Foundation Professor Dina Pomeranz presents research on how governments around the world are combating tax evasion. She talks about lessons learned on how to strengthen the capacity to collect taxes effectively and fairly, particularly in low and middle-income countries.

Live from the UZH Studios, we reviewed recent economic research on the topic and take questions from the audience via Mentimeter.

This was a public event with free access via livestream on our website in association with the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR).

Dina Pomeranz’s research focuses on developing countries, in particular on public finance, taxation, public procurement and firm development. Pushing the boundaries of empirical public finance research, she works closely with the governments in Chile, Ecuador and Kenya to analyze strategies to strengthen state capacity, and measure the impacts on government agencies, citizens and firms. In her work, she employs both randomized field experiments and retrospective empirical methods to demonstrate causal impacts using administrative data. Her work on taxation demonstrates the key role of information and of technology for tax enforcement, for example in the Value Added Tax. At the same time, her work also documents how the effectiveness of information can be limited in the face of enforcement constraints or when tax payers can shift their evasion to other, less monitored margins.

00:00 - 03:45 Intro Scheuer
03:45 - 35:15 Lecture Pomeranz
35:15 - 58:45 Q&A
58:45 - 1:00:31 Outro Scheuer

#EconomicsForSociety #UniversityOfZurich #EconomicsOfGlobalChallenges

[ubscenter]

Apologies for the poor mic quality in the Q&A, which involved switching to a fallback solution.

[florianhabermacher]

Very insightful in all its details, thanks a lot!

[elcenajeffers]

inequality is the issue, back in time would show, who, how, when, papertrail back down the line