Tax evasion for market control: Predatory economies in practice (AnthroTax)

Abstract:

Tax evasion is an economic justice issue in contemporary Croatia. Corporate tax evasion by massive conglomeratescontributes to local financial volatility. Bad financial practices at the top of this chain result in economic precarity at its otherend. AnthroTax conceptualizes the various local financial practices of tax evasion with a novel framing of ‘hostage barter’. Itemploys ethnographic field research methods to study how such practices play out between family winemakers in Istria,Croatia, and a massive agribusiness conglomerate with which they do business. This interdisciplinary project combinesclassic anthropological concepts with business studies to show how contemporary predatory market exchanges areconstructed and how tax evasion is enacted as an apparent ‘natural’ feature of everyday business. The researcher seeks tounderstand how the emerging economic system works, how hostage barter has become an inevitability of everydaybusiness, how gender influences its practice, and what hostage barter can teach us about predatory economies in widerpost-socialist Europe. AnthroTax will advance theory in critical tax studies by introducing a wholly new concept into the fieldand bring valuable insight to tax evasion processes that will contribute to both academia and government. Placing ananthropologist at one of Europe’s best business schools, particularly for interdisciplinary, qualitative research, AnthroTaxrepresents an unparalleled training-through-research opportunity for the scholar to advance her creative and innovativeresearch potential. AnthroTax’s interdisciplinarity, methodological strengths, and integration into targeted CBS researchgroups will facilitate diversification of her competences via skills acquisition, advanced training, and mobility bothinternationally and intersectorally. It will enhance cooperation between networks and facilitate a transfer of knowledge notjust institutionally, but outside academia to myriad relevant groups.