There is no scarcity of criticism of the methods that OECD governments have used – and not used – to prevent the spread of the Covid-19 virus. By contrast, the steps they have taken to deal with the economic consequences of the pandemic are more widely appreciated. The OECD now reports regularly on the wide…
At the request of the ICTD, Professor Richard Bird generously agreed to review the new World Bank publication Innovations in Tax Compliance, which proposes a new framework to help guide the design of tax reform efforts. Richard was the founding Chair of the Advisory Group of the ICTD, and is a long term advisor to…
See here for a response to Professor Bird’s critique by the World Bank framework’s lead author and ICTD Research Director Wilson Prichard. Innovations in Tax Compliance, a recent World Bank working paper, undertakes two tasks. First, it reviews the rapidly growing theoretical and especially empirical literature on how countries can improve tax compliance and, not…
Nigeria’s dependence on oil Nigeria relies more on oil than it does on direct taxes or any other forms of revenue to run its economy. Since discovering oil in 1956, Nigeria has become heavily reliant on oil revenue for survival – in the boom period preceding the 2014 oil price plummet (2010 – 2013), the…
British civil servants sign up to core values enshrined in the Civil Service Code: integrity, honesty, objectivity and impartiality. Implicit in these is evidence-based practice, which in turn suggests the need for a steady flow of relevant research. Although I have been reading research during many years working in DFID, it was only when I…
Nigeria’s performance on collected taxes is poor. Non-oil revenue in the country is around 3-4 percent of GDP, far below countries such as South Africa and Brazil where non-oil revenues lie between 20 and 25 percent of their GDP – or other peers in sub-Saharan Africa who typically collect more than 10 percent of GDP…
Recent years have seen surging international interest in strengthening tax collection in order to finance national development programs. Yet, despite evidence of high and frequently rising inequality across much of the developing world, strengthening the equity of tax systems has usually been low on the agenda. This in part reflects a technical debate: if the…
Over the past decade, international attention has increasingly focused on the potential contribution of taxation to improved development outcomes. In our recent book, Taxing Africa: Coercion, Reform and Development, we offer an overview of these issues and challenges in Africa. A major objective of the book is to highlight major political questions about taxation in Africa,…
What does tax justice mean at the local level, and how can the experiences of informal market traders be linked with broader international campaigns? This blog draws out insights from ActionAid’s experience of incorporating the demands of market traders in Nigeria into its international tax justice campaign.
Nancy Lee from the Centre for Global Development (CGD) recently published a piece arguing for a “surge in support” for domestic revenue mobilisation in low income countries and a major shift in how donor support for domestic revenue mobilisation is organised. It is an intriguing proposal, but one which is also likely to face very…
Since the turn of the millennium, the Lagos State government has made no secret of its ambitious plans to become an African ‘world class’ city, realizing its vision through borrowing as well as increased tax revenues. With 70% of the State being made up of water, land is a scarce and precious resource, so much…
Interest in wealth taxes has spiked recently due to disclosures of tax-haven abuses by the ultra-wealthy (the Panama Papers in April 2016 and the Paradise Papers in November 2017) and new empirical work on rising wealth inequality in countries around the world. These developments have led many to consider comprehensive wealth taxes as a potential…
