Ghana Experiment Finds Tax Education Alone Doesn’t Boost Revenue, Highlighting Limits of Weak Enforcement

A new field experiment in Ghana suggests that teaching citizens more about taxes does not automatically translate into higher tax revenues—and may even reveal why compliance can be hard to improve when the state’s enforcement capacity is limited.

In the study, economists Anders Jensen, Nikhil Kumar, and Konstantin Poensgen tested what happens when property owners and the frontline officials who interact with them receive structured tax education. The researchers randomly assigned the educational intervention, allowing them to isolate the causal effects of increasing tax knowledge rather than simply observing correlations between what people know and what they pay.

The program worked on its most direct goal: it raised participants’ understanding of the property tax system. That knowledge did not stay contained to those who were trained. Instead, it traveled through social networks, reaching neighboring property owners who did not themselves receive the training—evidence that information about taxes can diffuse informally within communities.

But higher knowledge did not produce the outcome many policymakers might hope for. Despite better-informed taxpayers and officials, the intervention did not increase property tax payments. The gap between learning and paying is central to the paper’s message: information campaigns alone may be insufficient when other constraints shape compliance.

The experiment also documented notable shifts in how citizens and officials interacted. After the education program, taxpayers and frontline staff became more active and engaged in their encounters. However, this increase in engagement did not develop into more cooperative or collaborative relationships between residents and the local state. In other words, the intervention changed the intensity of interactions, not their underlying tone or trust.

One reason payments did not rise may lie in how information changed beliefs. Rather than strengthening perceptions that the government could enforce payment, the education appears to have led taxpayers to downgrade their views of the state’s enforcement ability. Alongside that, participants became more aware of lawful strategies for lowering their tax obligations. In this framework, knowledge functions less as a nudge toward compliance and more as a tool citizens can use to navigate—sometimes minimize—their liabilities.

The authors characterize this as a “double-edged” effect of tax education. On one side, better understanding of rules can draw citizens into the system and encourage them to ask questions and interact with officials. On the other, it can also make the limits of enforcement more legible, and provide taxpayers with new ways to reduce what they owe without breaking the law.

The project received financial support from USAID and Harvard University. It obtained ethics approval from Harvard University’s Committee on the Use of Human Subjects (protocol IRB24-1119) and was registered with the AEA Registry (AEARCTR-0015079). The researchers also credit collaborators and the local government of Ablekuma Central for assistance with implementation and data collection, and note that the findings reflect the authors’ views rather than those of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Why it matters

Governments in low- and middle-income countries often look to information campaigns as a scalable way to strengthen local revenue, including property taxation. This evidence indicates that education can spread and reshape citizen behavior without increasing payments—especially if it highlights weak enforcement or expands awareness of legal avoidance. Future reforms may need to pair outreach with credible enforcement, administrative improvements, or redesigned tax rules to translate knowledge into revenue.