The Impact of Financial Development on Tax Evasion in Iran

The purpose of this paper is to identify factors affecting tax evasion with emphasis on financial development. For this purpose, we estimate an ARDL model for the period 1978 to 2014. Our results show that, at first, there is a long-run relationship between tax evasion and explanatory variables (financial development, literacy rate, government size and industry value added (%GDP). Secondly, financial development has a significant negative effect (in short-run and long-run) on tax evasion. In other words, higher financial development leads to lower tax evasion. This finding is consistent with the theoretical expectation. Thirdly, literacy rate, government size and industry value added (%GDP) have a significant negative effect on tax evasion. That means tax evasion is decreases by increasing each of them. Also, the variables of GDP per capita and tax complexity did not have a significant effect on tax evasion.