What are international tax disputes? Formally, international tax disputes are between the tax authorities of two different countries. They result from differing interpretations of the provisions of a tax treaty between the two countries. However, they mainly affect taxpayers with cross-border economic activities, usually transnational corporations (TNCs). Tax treaties are normally incorporated into domestic law. So,…
Last week I participated in a panel discussion at the Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA) Tax Summit on tax policy and economic development. Current fiscal policy is defined by a widening gap between expenditure and revenue generation putting a spotlight on the country’s tax regime and how to expand tax collection. While there are steps that…
A secure nation On a visit to Kigali, a lady extolled their army and why they have the respect of every citizen. Like every typical African, she could not reconcile how the world famous Nigerian military cannot take down Boko Haram. It is clear that we have underfunded our military in years past and recent…
From Wall Street to the World Bank, people are looking at Kampala as a model for how cities can finance their futures. This piece first appeared on Next City. Joseph Aliguma is perched on the bull bars of a minibus, listing his expenses. Every day he drives his 14-seater “taxi” between Kibale, in western Uganda,…
Last week, the Institute of Development Studies hosted its 50th anniversary conference titled “States, Markets and Society“. As part of the conference, the ICTD hosted a panel on the theme of taxation and fiscal contracts in Africa. The panellists were ICTD’s research directors Wilson Prichard and Giulia Mascagni, our Capacity Building Manager Jalia Kangave, and…
Sri Lankans sometimes like to claim perverse records for their country. You will likely have heard the proud assertion that ‘Sri Lanka has the highest suicide rate in the world’. Fortunately, that is not true. But here is a genuine perverse record, of which few people are aware: Sri Lanka holds the world record for…
A great deal of attention has been paid to the obstacles African governments face in effectively taxing the profits of transnational corporations. African governments are frequently urged to widen their tax bases by reducing tax incentives for foreign investors. But what about Africa’s rich? Some Africans are very rich, and in many cases they are…
In 2010, the ICTD launched efforts to create the ICTD government revenue dataset (GRD), which is increasingly recognized as the best possible source of cross-country revenue data for researchers. An important motivation was concern about the quality and transparency of data available from the IMF: Publicly available data had significant limitations, while the private data…
Over the past couple of weeks Malawi has become the latest poster child for UK campaigns arguing that changes to the international tax system can deliver outsize returns for development. Specifically, Action Aid is calling on the UK government to renegotiate a 60-year-old tax treaty. Questions were also raised about this issue in the House of…
It is widely recognised that property taxation is the most viable, efficient, and progressive means of raising local government revenue, with significant positive implications for state-building and public accountability. However, property tax collection remains very low in the developing world, and academic research on the topic is limited. For these reasons, the ICTD decided to…
On Wednesday, 31 countries formally agreed to support and implement one of the main recommendations put forward by the OECD to reduce tax avoidance by transnational corporations, the BEPS (Base Erosion and Profit Shifting) recommendations. This major initiative has been somewhat sidelined by media hype around Google tax payments. Have OECD governments missed the opportunity for more substantial…
In the past decades, the evolution of international norms has led fair labour practices and environmental sustainability to become core parts of corporate social responsibility. Is fair tax contribution next? How do international norms come to be? In the late 1990s, international relations scholars Martha Finnemore and Kathryn Sikkink developed a theory for how ideas develop…
