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The pandemic has had significant fiscal implications around the world. A key question facing governments is how the pandemic has shaped taxpayer attitudes and what that means for the prospects for tax reform and new revenue raising. We aim to understand the impacts of the pandemic on attitudes toward taxation in Sierra Leone with novel survey data, collected before the pandemic, shortly after the pandemic's onset, and for almost a year afterwards. Four key findings emerge. First, immediately after the crisis onset we see increased support for taxation in Freetown, despite escalating economic challenges. Second, at the same time that taxpayers show greater general support for taxation they become more likely to believe that one could refuse to pay taxes if government fails to deliver services in return. Third, while we lack baseline data on support for progressive taxation, we find rising and sustained support for it over the course of the pandemic. Finally, although we see an initial increase in willingness to pay more taxes for services, that support erodes over time. These findings have significant implications for understanding both immediate responses to the pandemic, and the broader politics of taxation and tax reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What does research on informal sector workers and the state entail in the time of Covid-19? The pandemic has limited possibilities for in-person interactions and required adaptations in research approaches. These challenges are exacerbated when the subjects of the research are informal sector workers with limited access to technology and undefined spaces of work. In this article, we argue that the Covid-19 pandemic has magnified distances: between researchers located globally; between researchers and respondents; and between the state and people within informal employment. However, these distances also create new ways of working and opportunities for doing research. We discuss the challenges faced in the field, document the adaptations introduced to ensure robust research in difficult settings, and set out the limitations that remain. We also examine the ethical dimension of confronting dangerous misinformation related to the pandemic while conducting interviews, and the questions it raises about the distance between research and prescriptive advocacy in academia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]