The proportion of economic activities that are categorised as informal or small-scale is unusually high in Zimbabwe. Given the depressed state of the economy over an extended period, it is logical that the government is more actively taxing small-scale business activities. Specifically, in 2005 the government introduced a presumptive tax (a tax on gross income),…
This report provides a descriptive analysis of discrepancies resulting from matching different value added tax (VAT) data sources in the Rwanda Revenue Authority database. VAT returns are declared by businesses of all sizes and types, from companies to individual traders. Internal discrepancy is the gap between different data sources, namely VAT declaration and VAT annexes,…
Read moreAfrican revenue authorities developed a growing interest in tax education as a key driver of compliance and in the context of a modern approach to tax administration (Mascagni and Santoro, 2018). Indeed, poor tax knowledge has a number of potentially serious implications. Firstly, it is likely to affect compliance. On the one hand, uninformed taxpayers…
Read moreProperty tax is tax charged on real estates or immovable assets. The tax base may be on land only, land and improvements on the land, or improvements on the land only. For the purpose of this paper property tax shall be referred to as tax on all types of immovable properties, residential, commercial and industrial,…
Read moreThis ICTD Research in Brief is a two-page summary of ICTD Working paper 89 by Marius Siebert and Anna Mbise. Are taxation systems in Africa biased against women? This is a hard question to answer and there is very little literature on the topic. Gender biases of personal income tax systems in developed countries have been well…
Read moreThe role of taxpayer education in improving tax compliance has been largely unexplored in the literature. This paper starts to fill this gap by providing the first rigorous evaluation of the effectiveness of taxpayer education on knowledge, perceptions, and compliance, which took place in Rwanda. Our analysis is based on a unique dataset that combines…
Read moreThe world’s lower-income countries face an urgent need for public revenue to build social and economic infrastructure. These countries, however, face a dilemma in seeking to tax the income of multinational companies operating within their borders. On the one hand, because lower-income countries face substantial limitations on their ability to raise revenue from broad-based taxes…
Read moreThis working paper adopts an urban lens on property tax. It focuses specifically on how property tax operates in two African secondary cities, Kisumu (Kenya) and M’Bour (Senegal). The paper identifies three factors shaping the low levels of property tax collection in the two case cities. These are the misalignment between the spatial scale of…
Read moreTax collection has historically – in Africa and elsewhere – been collected almost entirely by men, partly reflecting patterns of authority and privilege in society, and partly owing to the traditionally coercive and confrontational approaches used. The situation is changing, with women entering the profession in increasing numbers, in part because of changes in the…
Read moreThis ICTD Research in Brief is a two-page summary of ICTD Working paper 87 by Vanessa van den Boogaard. This series is aimed at policy makers, tax administrators, fellow researchers and anyone else who is big on interest and short on time. In recent years, activists and policy-oriented researchers have begun to explore how tax…
Read moreThis ICTD Research in Brief is a two-page summary of ICTD Working paper 84 by Henry Saka, Ronald Waiswa and Jalia Kangave. This series is aimed at policy makers, tax administrators, fellow researchers and anyone else who is big on interest and short on time. In the past three decades, revenue authorities in African countries…
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