Tax Avoidance, Tax Evasion, and their Countermeasures

The increasing mobility of capital, firms, financial activities and individuals along with increasing international integration of business models pose a challenge for countries to raise tax revenues. This pillar addresses tax avoidance from different perspectives and contributes to the evaluation and development of effective countermeasures. Illegal evasion activities represent a related problem for tax enforcement and revenues, which will be covered in this pillar. The multilayer issues of evasion and avoidance require a broad set of methods and data. Research in this pillar relies on ex-post methods to identify causal effects, simulation methods, randomized experiments, administrative data and confidential bank data.