Tax Evasion: The Interplay of Happiness and Public Governance in Europe and <scp>OECD</scp> Nations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT This study investigates the relationship between happiness (HAPP) and tax evasion behaviour in European and OECD countries, with a focus on the moderating role of public governance. Happiness is measured using the Life Ladder Index from the World Happiness Report, while the shadow economy serves as a proxy for estimating tax evasion. Data from 36 countries—28 European and 8 OECD—spanning the period 2005–2022 was analysed using regression models. The findings reveal a significant negative relationship between happiness and tax evasion. Moreover, the moderating analysis highlights that happiness significantly affects tax evasion in countries with low public governance but has an insignificant impact in countries with high public governance. These results underscore the importance of strengthening public governance to mitigate the influence of psychological factors, such as happiness, on tax compliance behaviour.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".