Paper Title
The Effect of Tax Avoidance and Tax Evasion on the Performance of South African Economy

Abstract
African governments lose billions of dollars in tax income due to fraudulent money flows and tax evasion, limiting their capacity to deliver services and discouraging economic growth. South Africa is no exception where decline in tax revenue receipts are due to tax evasion, resulting in a negative impact on economic growth and development. Concerns regarding tax budgeted, tax collected and tax evaded and avoided is a topical issue, that requires further research. Hence, this research paper aims to explore the effect of avoidance and evasion of taxes on South Africa's economic expansion.The paper will also discuss the literature on the causes of this tax evasion and avoidance, which will guideSouth African policymakers in policy formulation. The natural logarithm of the gap between total budgeted tax income and realised tax income will be employed as a metric of tax evasion and avoidance in South Africa from 1994 to 2020 for this key research work.Ordinary Least Squares Regression (OLS) regression analysis will be employed to evaluate whether the link between Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and tax evaded and avoidedis strong or weak. Test for stationarity to see whether the parameter does not vary over timeand forOLS will be performed. This paper seeks to fill the gap and contribute to the empirical development of the root causes and effect of tax evasion and tax avoidance in the context of South African Economy. Furthermore, to provide recommendations on how the South Africa government and tax collectors can improve their taxation administration to improve revenue collection and eliminate tax evasion and avoidance as effectively as possible.