improved communications alone may improve compliance or support for reform over the short term, it seems unlikely to be sustained in the absence of concrete improvements.

Assuming that governments are genuinely committed to improving services, increasing transparency is one strategy to achieve corresponding improvements in public trust. At the local government level this may mean publishing documents detailing revenue raised, and public expenditure by projects and categories. At the national level a growing number of countries publish – sometimes in newspapers – all public spending projects, thus allowing for more targeted public expenditure monitoring. In Kenya, for example, civil society groups have sought to explicitly link citizens’ status as taxpayers to their expenditure tracking advocacy.<sup>138</sup> However, there are important concerns about the efficacy of transparency initiatives alone. Most basically, the available information may be of limited immediate value to most taxpayers. It may be difficult to access, or difficult to understand, and thus may depend on intermediary groups – civil society and the media in particular - to “translate” it into a form that is useful to a broader group of taxpayers. These groups, of course, are frequently weak. While civil society and media engagement with spending issues is extensive, tax issues frequently remain less covered. And, of course, the availability of information is only likely to encourage trust if the information provided is evidence of effective government performance that meets popular expectations. Transparency about poor performance may, in fact, reinforce a lack of trust in public authorities.

A related option is to try to demonstrate connections between taxes and broader public goods more explicitly and directly. The increasingly common taxpayer education programs represent one channel,<sup>139</sup> and in a growing range of countries these are accompanied by call-in radio shows and public forums designed to create engagement between taxpayers and governments. Recent research presents evidence that well-designed taxpayer education programs can significantly increase tax knowledge, while also having positive effects on compliance – effects that appear largely attributable to facilitating compliance but may also reflect improved willingness to pay.<sup>140</sup> An alternative approach is targeted communication about tax-expenditure links. As noted above, an experiment in Rwanda found that letters to taxpayers stressing the connections between taxes and services were generally at least as effective as enforcement threats in increasing compliance.<sup>141</sup> Still, communication-based interventions may have a limited ceiling, or diminishing returns. Telling taxpayers about the link between tax payments and public services is unlikely to be a

> 138 Prichard, W. (2015). _Taxation, responsiveness and accountability in developing countries: The dynamics of tax bargaining_ . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

> 139 OECD. (2015). _Building Tax Culture, Compliance and Citizenship: A Global Source Book on Taxpayer Education_ . Paris: Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development; Prichard, W., Beach, R., Mohiuddin, F., & van den Boogaard, V. (forthcoming). The micro-links between taxation and accountability initiatives. _ICTD Working Paper_ . Brighton: International Centre for Tax and Development.

> 140 Mascagni, G; Santoro, F. & Mukama, D. (2019). Teach to comply? Evidence from a taxpayer education programme in Rwanda. _ICTD Working Paper 91_ . Brighton: International Centre for Tax and Development; Similarly, a World Bank project that combined tax infrastructure improvements with a comprehensive education program resulted in significant increases in tax revenue. World Bank, (2017). Modernization, Taxpayer Education Provide Good Foundation for Tax Collection in Tanzania. Washington, DC: World Bank Group. http://www.worldbank.org/en/results/2017/01/05/modernization-taxpayer-education-provide-goodfoundation-for-tax-collection-in-tanzania

> 141 Mascagni, G., Nell, C., & Monkam, N. (2017). One size does not fit all: A field experiment on the drivers of tax compliance and delivery methods in Rwanda. _ICTD Working Paper 58_ . Brighton: International Centre for Tax and Development.

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