1 Introduction

Tax revenues are crucial for governments to provide public goods and services to the population. Therefore, tax compliance is imperative for a healthy economy. In turn, tax compliance is determined by many internal and external factors for individuals and businesses such as the probability of audit, tax knowledge (Inasius 2019), incentives, public governance quality (Ayuba et al. 2016) detection and punishment, the burden of taxation, and social norms (Alm et al. 1995). Tax morale is also one of the main factors determining tax compliance. Alm and Torgler (2006) define succinctly tax morale as the “intrinsic willingness to pay taxes.”

Much has been written about tax morale, and there are comprehensive reviews of the literature on that topic like the works by Saeed and Shah (2011), Ritsatos (2014), and Horodnic (2018). Nevertheless, there is a dearth of literature reviews that focus specifically on culture as the main element in shaping tax morale, despite this topic has generated growing interest in the literature, as shown in Fig. 1. As a first glimpse, this graphic shows the results of a quick search on the Scopus database with the terms “culture” and “tax morale” on any field of the documents, within a time range from 1998 to 2023 (being the first related document found in 2002).

Fig. 1
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Documents involving culture and tax morale by year. Source: (SCOPUS, n.d.)

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This glimpse shows an exponential growth in research output. Therefore, it is necessary to generate an up-to-date analysis of the literature on tax morale from the point of view of the cultural approach to economics. Consequently, this article aims to map out current empirical research on tax morale linked to cultural factors, outline knowledge gaps, and offer recommendations for future investigation.

This review poses three research questions, grouped into the following categories: geographic outreach, cultural aspects, and methodology. (1) Is contemporary literature on culture as a fundamental basis for tax morale mainly cross-country, or is it focused on specific countries or communities inside countries? (2) Do the works address multiple cultural factors? or Do they emphasize specific ones? (3) What methods are researchers employing, i.e., quantitative, qualitative, or hybrid?

This article is structured as follows: The first part provides a brief overview of the cultural approach to economics, addresses the concept of tax morale, and discusses why culture cultural factors are relevant to explain it. The second section describes the methods employed for this review. The third part shows the data processing and its outcomes. The fourth section discusses the results, and the fifth draws conclusions and points to potential niches for future research.

1.1 The cultural approach to economics

It is currently widely recognized that culture plays a crucial role in economics both for individual behavior of economic agents and for macro-level outcomes, especially for economic development (Harrison and Huntington 2000; Williamson 2009). The cultural approach to economics tries to identify the cultural factors determining economic performance and explores related topics such as informal institutions, cultural transmission, and cultural change (Gershman 2017; Harrison and Berger 2006).

One of the most challenging tasks for the cultural approach to economics has been how to measure the impact of different cultural factors on the economy. Experts from different fields around the world have conducted several surveys gathering data on cultural traits to create databases. Some of the surveys have a global outreach, such as the World Values Survey (WVS), while others are region-oriented like the European Values Study (EVS) and Latinobarometro (Gershman 2017). Another valuable instrument widely used around the world is Hofstede’s cultural dimensions model. This model poses six dimensions: power distance, individualism vs. collectivism, masculinity vs. femininity, uncertain avoidance, long-term orientation vs. short-term normative orientation, and indulgence vs. restraint (Hofstede et al. 2010). Both the surveys and the cultural dimensions have been exploited by numerous authors for almost half a century, whereas others have developed their own research instruments to provide evidence of cultural traits as relevant factors for economic performance.

1.2 Tax morale and culture

A critical aspect of economic policy is how states can improve their revenue collection and motivate citizens to comply with their taxes. It is a matter of interest for both researchers and policymakers to explore how culture shapes taxpayers’ compliance or avoidance. This leads to the concept of tax culture, defined by Nerré as “the entirety of all relevant formal and informal institutions connected with the national tax system and its practical execution which are historically embedded within the country’s culture, including the dependencies and ties caused by their ongoing interaction”(Nerré 2006, p. 190).

One of the componentsFootnote 1 of tax culture is tax morale (Nerré 2006). The term “tax morale” refers to the intrinsic willingness of taxpayers to comply with their obligations to the treasury. Luttmer and Singhal define tax morale as “an umbrella term capturing nonpecuniary motivations for tax compliance as well as factors that fall outside the standard, expected utility framework. For example, individuals may have some intrinsic motivation to pay taxes or feel guilt or shame for failure to comply” (Luttmer and Singhal 2014, p. 150). Tax morale is developed from the prevailing moral and ethical values and objectives in a community, as well as from its understanding of the importance of taxation for the state and society (Lomsadze 2021). According to Horodnic, tax morale has been studied since the 1960s, but has gained attention since the 1990s, so much so that it has become one of the main topics in tax compliance research (Horodnic 2018).

Undoubtedly, as several studies have demonstrated, cultural factors are crucial in shaping tax moraleFootnote 2 (Alm and Torgler 2006; Luttmer and Singhal 2014). The present review addresses this type of research conducted over the last twenty-five years.

2 Methodology

2.1 Protocol and registration

This scoping review was conducted under the methodology suggested by the PRISMA-ScR extension (Tricco et al. 2018) and chapter 11 of the JBI Manual for Evidence Synthesis (Peters et al. 2020). The protocol for this research was registered in Open Science Framework and can be consulted through the following link: https://osf.io/kvtqu.

2.2 Information sources and eligibility criteria

This work delved into three databases specialized in economics and business to find the most specific literature according to the objectives of this study: ABI/Inform, Econlit, and Business Source Ultimate. Additionally, two general databases—Scopus and The Web of Science—were consulted to include as many scientific articles as possible that might have some content relevant to this work.

The period of study runs from January 1, 1998, to December 31, 2022, to obtain the most updated works in the field.

2.3 Search strategy

For all the databases, a digital search was conducted using Boolean operators as follows: “culture” AND “tax morale.” Whenever the search yielded terms close to “tax morale,” such as “tax compliance” and “tax culture,” the results were accepted for screening. Additionally, related opposite terms like “shadow economy,” “gray economy,” and “underground economy” were also admitted to the analysis. The outcomes of the research also returned registers with the term “culture” itself and some others with specific cultural aspects such as beliefs, social values or norms, trust, and religion.

2.4 Selection of sources of evidence

This review only includes works addressing as their main objective, the link between culture and tax morale.

Only peer-reviewed articles in scientific journals written in English were considered acceptable. English was chosen because most of the international scientific literature is written in that language (Di Bitetti and Ferreras 2017; Stockemer and Wigginton 2019).

The selection of sources of evidence was made using a three-step procedure: First, the records were identified in the data sources. The records yielded by the search were exported to a citation manager and duplicated works were merged. Second, the records were screened according to the eligibility criteria. Third, full-text articles were assessed for eligibility. Finally, only those works that match the objective and approach of this review were chosen and compiled for the final meta-analysis.

2.5 Data charting process, data items, and critical appraisal of sources

Records of articles selected for review were exported to an XLS file. The database was refined to leave just the columns for year, author, title, and publisher. Four columns were added to the database according to the variables to be identified: (1) the methods employed in the articles, whether they are quantitative or qualitative, what kind of analysis they used (interviews, regression analysis, etc.), if they exploited their own surveys or external sources, and the size of the sample; (2) the most relevant conclusions of each work related to the objectives of this review; (3) if the article addressed multiple or specific cultural factors (such as religion, patriotism, ethnic identity, or trust); (4) how many and which countries or communities were examined.

2.6 Synthesis of results

All the articles selected for this review were synthesized in the two text tables (displayed in Sect. 3) according to their approach: Table 1 presents cross-country studies, and Table 2 contains specific country/community-focused works. Tables 1 and 2 show the products of the analysis of each work and displays the following information: (1) author name/year of publication; (2) methodology and sample size; (3) main findings; (4) cultural aspects examined; (5) cross-country outreach, for articles of the first type, or country/community, for articles of the second type.

Table 1 Cross-country studies (n = 41)
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Table 2 Studies focused on a specific country or community (n = 25)
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3 Data processing and results

The complete process for the selection of sources of evidence is shown in Fig. 2. This flowchart displays the outcomes of the literature search. The final examination yielded sixty-six articles to be analyzed. In all cases, the articles referred to as irrelevant were considered as such because they did not meet the objectives of this work.

Fig. 2
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Process for the selection of sources of evidence*. *The flowchart is based on the recommendations of Page et al. (2021)

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All the articles accepted for the review were analyzed, and the results are displayed in Tables 1 and 2. All the cross-country studies are shown in Table 1, while Table 2 presents works focused on specific countries or communities within countries.

4 Findings

This study confirms that in the last twenty-five years, the literature shows ample evidence of culture as a critical factor in shaping tax morale. Now, the following subsections will answer the research questions posed in the introduction with the results obtained from the literature analysis.

4.1 Geographic outreach

Is contemporary literature on culture as a fundamental basis for tax morale mainly cross-country, or is it focused on specific countries or communities inside countries? This analysis shows that almost two-thirds (41/66, approx. 62%) of the literature are cross-country studies, and just one-third (25/66 approx. 38%) focus on one specific country or a region within a country.

4.2 Cultural aspects

Do the works address multiple cultural factors, or do they emphasize specific ones? The results reveals that most of the research (48/66, about 73%) has addressed multiple cultural facets at once, while few (18/66, around 27%) tackle specific aspects of culture such as religion (8), trust (5), or ethnic identity (2).

4.3 Methods

Are the methods that researchers employ in the field mostly quantitative, qualitative, or hybrid? This review determined that research in the field for the past twenty-five years has been overwhelmingly quantitative (62/66, about 94%) except for four works (6%).

5 Conclusions

This literature analysis presents evidence that even though the relationship between culture and tax morale has been widely explored, there are some gaps and research niches that should be addressed in future works. First, there are scarce qualitative studies in the field. It is important to note that the link between culture and tax morale involves deep aspects of the collective consciousness and behavior of human beings. Statistics and cold figures cannot always capture these intangibles. Therefore, future research should consider the use of more qualitative methodology or a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods.

Secondly, while cross-country studies are still relevant, it is necessary to develop more research focused on specific countries and regions within countries. Cross-country studies have the advantage that they compare tax morale between different cultures. Furthermore, given that political borders do not necessarily coincide with cultural borders, cross-country works can identify certain patterns in the tax morale of people living in different countries that share a single culture.

On the other hand, studies focused on a single country or region within a country can provide valuable information to national legislators and tax authorities to better understand tax compliance and tax avoidance behavior in the context of specific cultural-regional frameworks. Therefore, future research should generate more works on smaller communities or minority communities within the countries.

Third, more works should address how some particular cultural facets like religion, ethnic identity, patriotism, or trust, individually affect tax morale. Whereas it is useful to explore multiple cultural variables at the same time to determine their impact on tax morale, for further investigation, it would be also valuable to deepen the study of cultural aspects separately to develop a better understanding of how tax morale is shaped in different cultures. Moreover, the cultural factors found to have the greatest weight in determining tax morale could help policymakers determine whether it is necessary to preserve, encourage, or otherwise try to modify those specific aspects.

Finally, it is important to acknowledge some limitations of this review. In the first place, this research used three specialized and two general databases. While the quality of those databases is well-known globally, more works might be found in other databases and additional sources such as gray literature, videos, and podcasts. Additionally, sometimes it is difficult to find a clear boundary between aspects of culture and other factors. For instance, the border between ethics and culture may be quite blurred, since individual and corporate ethics are largely shaped by cultural context. Another example is tax behavior can be studied from a psychological view, but human behavior is also influenced by culture.

Even with these limitations, the results of this review highlight the need for culture to continue to be a fundamental element to be considered by legislatures and policymakers in tax matters. Research on tax morale and its cultural roots has been and will continue to be a fundamental element to improve tax compliance.