Though education is a core duty of the state, public education in Sierra Leone is financed not only by the formal government budget and off-budget aid, but also by informal contributions, taxes, and fees paid by households. Since independence in 1961, the state has consistently supported the ideal of universal free primary education, though in…
During the summer of 2020, the International Budget Partnership (IBP) and the International Centre for Tax and Development (ICTD) worked collaboratively to conduct a broad scan of civil society organisations (CSOs) working in the taxation space with a specific interest in domestic taxation. Our objective was to create a comprehensive picture of the emerging field,…
When work on the taxation of the digital economy kicked off as part of the OECD/G20 Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS) Project in late 2018, there seemed to be a broad agreement that international tax rules needed an overhaul to successfully tax billion dollar tech giants like Amazon, Google and Facebook. Key to this…
A vast network of tax treaties to facilitate investment When comparing countries’ foreign direct investment, you would expect the world’s largest economies to top the list. However, in this world, where businesses structure their international investments following the logic of tax minimization, the Netherlands sits firmly at the top, along with the United States and…
Despite being recognised as a critical aspect of tax compliance, taxpayer knowledge is a very under-explored topic. Using evidence from Rwanda and Eswatini, Giulia Mascagni explores why taxpayer education matters, whether it is effective, and how research can inform governments’ taxpayer education programmes. Across Africa, many taxpayers have a shockingly poor understanding of the tax…
Amid the Covid-19 pandemic, changes that might ordinarily take a few years are now occurring in the span of just a few months. The uptake of e-commerce and the adoption of video-conferencing, for example, have increased rapidly. This distinctive feature of crises—that they can accelerate otherwise slow-moving trends—can be harnessed by those seeking to create…
One of the strongest arguments for investing in the tax capacity of developing countries is the supposed participation dividend of taxation. Beyond providing more tax revenue with which the government can supply essential public services, tax collection is thought to stimulate citizen engagement in the government, and ultimately, political accountability. The accumulated evidence of a…
The increased emphasis on the role of sustainable financing to support the realisation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015 underscored a renewed initiative to enhance domestic resource mobilisation (DRM), especially in developing countries. Under target 17.1 of the SDGs, countries committed to strengthen DRM through international support to developing countries to improve, in…
More and more countries, including developing countries, are introducing unilateral measures to adapt their corporate tax rules to a digitalising economy. For countries as varied as Kenya, India and Tunisia, this has taken the form of a tax on digital services provided by foreign companies, often referred to collectively as Digital Services Taxes (DSTs), or…
Recurrent episodes of marginal communities being evicted from the waterfronts of Lagos have made global media headlines over the last four years. Up until 2016, the city had earned a hard-won status as a model of good urban governance for Africa. Along with better transport systems, waste management and security, the Lagos state government had re-established control over planning and…
Mobile money taxation is, for some, a controversial topic. One the one hand, it is critical for developing countries to increase domestic revenue in order to finance public goods and services and achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. One the other, mobile money is seen as something of a development success story, providing access to financial…
Developing countries lose substantial revenues every year to corporate tax avoidance, exacerbated by globalization and digitalization. As part of the OECD/G20 project on addressing the tax challenges of the digitalization of the economy, the OECD secretariat have recently presented the Unified Approach (UA) to deal with the tax revenue losses from digitalization, by giving market…
