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…
This piece is co-published with the International Budget Partnership. Since its onset, governments the world over have responded to the Covid-19 pandemic by ramping up spending and providing tax relief to ailing families and businesses, even in the face of dwindling revenues. This has inevitably led to widened fiscal deficits and ballooning public debts. For…
International money laundering and international illicit financial flows (IFFs) are major problems for poor and rich countries alike, but especially the poor. Both are strongly rooted in fraudulent treatment of imports and exports as they cross international borders. This includes smuggling, misclassification of products to change their valuation, and straight mis-invoicing, i.e. deliberately declaring erroneous…
Globally, governments are adjusting their tax policies to help address the effects of the coronavirus pandemic. In most countries, these adjustments have focused on supporting businesses to weather the economic disruptions of Covid-19 restrictions. Governments everywhere have been called on to defer or waive taxes on the businesses most affected by lockdowns and other restrictions….
There is growing international attention on tax collection in low-income countries. This attention is only amplifying in light of the increased revenue pressures faced by governments around the world as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. While governments will be seeking new revenue sources in the coming years, increased revenue is only desirable in so…
The OECD secretariat recently proposed a “stock taking exercise” to “re-examine how international tax rules currently meet the needs of developing countries” leading potentially to a “new deal on international taxation as part of the international effort to rebuild economic life in the post Covid-19 era.” The OECD’s Pascal Saint-Amans has suggested that this may…
Globally, tax collections are declining. Governments have cancelled or postponed some tax dues in the effort to bolster economies and keep enterprises solvent. With employment, trade and profits nevertheless shrinking, opportunities to collect income and profit taxes, VAT, and excise and import duties are also dwindling. For the next two years at least, many governments…
In the next few weeks, residents of Freetown are expecting to receive new property tax bills as part of a revamped and more progressive system. Approved as Sierra Leone was entering lockdown in mid-April, the revised arrangement places a greater onus on the richest and could increase the capital’s tax revenue five-fold. The new system has been…
In the wake of the global financial crisis of 2007-08, tax havens became a hot topic as political leaders zeroed in on exotic, low-tax jurisdictions as sources of fiscal instability that exacerbated the crisis. With the Covid-19 pandemic, tax havens have been even more immediately and strongly linked to the crisis and the prospects for…
So far, policy discussions about tax responses to Covid-19 have focused overwhelmingly on how to offer immediate tax relief. There is a clear sequence in these discussions: tax relief today, expanded revenue collection in the future to compensate. This blog explores a less conventional argument: that African governments may want to think much more immediately…
