We are pleased to welcome Dr Giovanni Occhiali, who joined our team last month as a Research Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies.
Giovanni is a Development Economist with a PhD from the University of Birmingham. His research focuses on sub-Saharan Africa, and outside the field of taxation, his main interests are energy economics and industrial policies. His PhD thesis was on the detrimental effect of unstable electricity supply on firms’ productivity in sub-Saharan Africa.
After completing his doctorate, he went on to work as an Overseas Development Institute Fellow at the National Revenue Authority (NRA) of Sierra Leone, working in the Monitoring, Research, and Planning department. He was in charge of the internal monthly revenue forecasting and part of a small team who worked on the revenue estimation for the national budget. He also did a substantial amount of work in determining the issues with the current ICT system in each operational department, and how this impacted the NRA’s capacity to monitor compliance.
With the ICTD, Giovanni will work on a number of projects related to Tax Administration and Compliance and Tax and Governance, and will co-lead our capacity building programme with Dr Max Gallien.