https://academic.oup.com/book/36357/chapter/319888230#426336...

> In percentage terms this means that during the 1970s between 15 and 20 percent of Italians evaded taxes while the rate climbed to 26 percent in the 1980s. In the 1990s, tax evasion fell again, hovering between 15 and 20 percent. Workers employed in manufacturing evade very little, whereas the highest evasion rates can be found among the self-employed

> The severity of evasion becomes obvious when we consider that the Italian state annually collects only a total of €350 billion while losing €250 billion through evasion (D’Attoma 2016).

> If one asks Italians why they evade taxes, they primarily say that they evade because everyone else does so

> A distant second is the reason that Italians would be more likely to pay taxes if they had the feeling that the state would spend their money more wisely. Much lower in the ranking come issues such as the soft penalties for evasive behavior, the complexity of the tax rules, and the unlikeliness of being caught. A total of 87.1 percent of all Italians think that their fellow citizens evade taxes