Research in Brief 15

In low-income and post-conflict countries, and particularly in rural areas, citizens often pay a range of ‘taxes’ that differ substantially from statutory policies. These ‘informal taxes’, paid to a variety of state and non-state actors, are frequently overlooked in analyses of local systems of taxation. This is problematic, as it leads to misunderstandings of individual and household tax burdens, as well as of systems of local governance. This is a 2-page brief summary of Working Paper 66 by Samuel Jibao, Wilson Prichard, and Vanessa van den Boogaard.

Read the brief in Krio here. 

Read the brief in French here.

Authors

Samuel Jibao

Samuel Jibao is the Director of the Centre for Economic Research and Capacity Building in Freetown, Sierra Leone. He is also an Assistant Lecturer at the African Tax Institute at the University of Pretoria, and the former Commissioner-General of the National Revenue Authority of Sierra Leone.

Wilson Prichard

Wilson Prichard is an Associate Professor at the University of Toronto, a Research Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies, and Chief Executive Officer of the International Centre for Tax and Development. His research focuses on the relationship between taxation and citizen demands for improved governance in sub-Saharan Africa.

Vanessa van den Boogaard

Vanessa is a Research Fellow at the ICTD and a Senior Research Associate at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto. She completed her PhD thesis on informal revenue generation and statebuilding in Sierra Leone, and has ongoing research on the topic in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Somalia. Vanessa leads the ICTD’s new programme on civil society engagement in tax reform and co-leads the research programme on informal taxation.
Cette publication est disponible en français
Download
Read the full paper
Read the 2-page brief