Education Policies and Tax Evasion in Developing Countries

The goal of this article is to highlight the consequences that tax evasion could impact on schooling duration and expenditures in education. We don't make any specific assumptions as regards the origin of the tax evasion. We simply consider a society made up of two categories of heterogeneous agents, the rich and the poor. Among the rich people, some declare their total income whereas the others declare the same income as the poor. While the government is unable to control this factor, it can't distinguish the wealthy tax evaders from the poor ones either. Moreover, in the human capital accumulation function, we have introduced complementarities between personal tax contributions. Our model is declined in two cases, each corresponding to different education policies characterized by different ways of education funding. In the public education regime, the government collects income tax. Tax revenues are used to finance education. In the mixed education regime (public and private), the government finances education by collecting income tax whereas the richest parents can complete this education privately. We show that taxation depends positively on how large the tax evasion is but we also show that, in the mixed education regime, this sub optimality can be corrected by a longer compulsory length of schooling.