The 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…
This 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…
Read moreTwentieth century institutions of global economic governance face a profound challenge adapting to the rise of emerging markets and, especially, China’s rise. This is especially the case for the international tax regime, whose institutional home is the OECD and which is based on norms that favour capital exporting states. To understand the nature of the…
Read moreIn this paper we examine market taxation in Dar es Salaam from a gender perspective. We do not find any evidence of gender bias in the way market traders are taxed, but we do find a major gender issue that we did not expect – toilet fees. Female traders pay up to 18 times more…
Read moreInformation communication technology (ICT) is an important tool to support local governments in their efforts to more efficiently administer property taxes and other own-source revenues. Increasingly, developing countries, including those in Africa, are managing large volumes of data on taxable properties and taxpayers within the ICT environment. With reference to four African cities, this paper…
Read moreThis paper considers how men and women in eastern and northern Sierra Leone interact differently with formal and informal revenue collection. It argues that the literature on tax and gender equity needs to be expanded in low-income countries to pay greater attention to the ways that citizens pay for public services in practice. It shows…
Read moreThis ICTD Research in Brief is a two-page summary of ICTD Working paper 86 by Sol Picciotto. This series is aimed at policy makers, tax administrators, fellow researchers and anyone else who is big on interest and short on time. The international system for taxation of the profits of multinational enterprises (MNEs) is deeply dysfunctional….
Read moreThe defects in the rules for allocation of the income of transnational corporations (TNCs) are at the heart of the current crisis in international corporate taxation. This paper explains how these rules emerged and developed, becoming increasingly complex, as they have shifted from a general concern to ensure a fair and reasonable allocation of the…
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