11:00 - 13:15
Thursday-Panel
Chair/s:
Jonas Bunte
Discussant/s:
Thomas Sattler
Meeting Room G

Matthew Digiuseppe, Alexander Slaski, Patrick Shea
Discounting Government Debt: Individual attitudes towards debt reduction in Brazil

Kathleen Brown
Determinants of China’s Hidden Overseas Lending

Jonas Bunte, Burak Giray, Patrick Shea
Selling Sovereignty: International Coercion, Debt Diplomacy, and Land Transactions

Barry Maydom, Ana Isabel Lopez Garcia
Migration, Remittances and the Fiscal Contract
Migration, Remittances and the Fiscal Contract
Barry Maydom 1, Ana Isabel Lopez Garcia 2
1 Birkbeck College, University of London
2 University of Konstanz

How does the receipt of remittances shape attitudes towards taxation? We argue that receiving remittances weakens the fiscal contract of taxation in return for public services. Those who receive remittances can use the money sent by friends or family overseas to obtain public services like health and education on the private market instead of through tax-funded government schemes. Previous studies of the relationship between remittances and taxation have taken a macro-level view, focusing on how remittance flows affect how much money governments receive from various types of taxation. Our paper is the first to examine this relationship at the individual level, building on recent work examining the micro-foundations of the fiscal contract in developing countries and analysing the connections between family migration and attitudes towards redistribution and public spending. Using survey data from Africa and Latin America, we find that those who receive money from abroad are less supportive of taxation and more likely to approve of tax evasion and avoidance. The evidence suggests that migrant remittances can undermine the development of a robust fiscal contract.