International taxation sentiment and COVID-19 crisis

Investigating public sentiment regarding tax policy during the COVID-19 pandemic could be useful for understanding the experiences across societies. Using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count to investigate and quantitatively measure the pandemic's effect-from January 25 to April 9, 2020-on the sentiment regarding possible tax policies throughout the world, thereby deter-mining that, overall, taxation sentiment is reduced as the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases grows. Further investigation reveals that, as COVID-19 spreads, the sentiment for raising taxes decreases and that for reducing taxes increases, and this effect is mitigated by countries' de-mocracy. We further find that news sentiment in unofficial media and in countries with low social trust is more significantly affected by COVID-19. Robustness tests performed using different subsamples of developed and developing countries and different pandemic circumstances validate our findings. This research has crucial implications for policy evaluation and development.