- Umar Bello, PhD*
- Department of Accounting Federal University of Kashere
This
article investigated the relationship between human development, tax compliance
and the quality of governance in the case of Nigeria which is analyzed between
1999 and 2023. The sources used to obtain the data of the study consist of
websites of United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), World Bank, Federal
Inland Revenue Service and National Bureau of Statistics (NBS). The data was
not normally distributed and therefore the spearman correlation and quantile
regression were used to study the relation at the lower quantile which applies
to the low-HDI countries such as Nigeria. The results indicated that overall
negative effect of compliance with taxes on HDI, meaning that the trend of
collecting more taxes does not always correspond to better human development.
The latter can be caused by misutilization of tax revenues, corruption, or low
quality of government services. On the other hand, governance quality as
denoted by Corruption Perception Index (CPI) exerts a positive and significant
impact upon HDI pointing at the significance of transparency and
accountability. The paper highlights that to make taxation a positive feature
in human development, there should be a proper tax revenue allocation, better
governance and citizens friendly tax policies.
