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Publications

Showing 252-263 of 415 publications
June 2017

Taxing the urban boom in Tanzania: Central versus local government property tax collection

by Odd-Helge Fjeldstad, Merima Ali & Lucas Katera

Effective collection of property taxes requires constructive working relations between the central government revenue authority and the municipalities, independent of the mode of administration. Clear division of function and responsibility between the local and the central government is critical for effective policy implementation. The implementation of property taxes in Tanzania has seen major changes in…

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April 2017

Survey on Total Tax Burden in the DRC

by Laura Paler, Wilson Prichard, Raul Sanchez de la Sierra & Cyrus Samii

This study of total tax burden and revenue leakage in the DRC was launched in April 2015 to estimate the total tax burden on households and businesses in the DRC, to understand the character of this tax burden and, to the extent possible, to produce rough estimates of the share of tax payments reaching the…

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April 2017

Perspectives from the Field: SDC Cooperation for Property Taxation

by Giulia Mascagni & Christopher Nell

This paper reviews three projects implemented in the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation’s (SDC) Democratisation, Decentralisation and Local Governance Network (DDLGN) that aim to provide incentives for local governments to increase tax compliance and revenues. The investigation focuses on three projects that aim to improve local revenue mobilisation: (1) a competition among municipalities in…

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March 2017

Informal Taxation in Post-Conflict Sierra Leone: Taxpayers’ Experiences and Perceptions

by Samuel Jibao, Wilson Prichard & Vanessa van den Boogaard

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…

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March 2017

The Fiscal Effects of Aid in Ethiopia: Evidence from CVAR Applications

by Giulia Mascagni & Emilija Timmis

This article explores the fiscal effects of aid in Ethiopia using the Cointegrated Vector Auto-Regressive (CVAR) methodology to model complex long-run and short-run dynamics. We use national data for 1961–2010, including a measure of aid capturing flows through the budget as measured by the recipient. The data suggests three main conclusions on the long-run equilibrium….

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March 2017

Global distribution of revenue loss from tax avoidance – Re-estimation and country results

by Alex Cobham & Petr Janský

International corporate tax is an important source of government revenue, especially in lower-income countries. An important recent study of the scale of this problem was carried out by International Monetary Fund researchers Ernesto Crivelli, Ruud De Mooij, and Michael Keen. We first re-estimate their innovative model, and then explore the effects of introducing higher-quality revenue…

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March 2017

From The Lab to The Field: A Review of Tax Experiments

by Giulia Mascagni

Tax experiments have been gaining momentum in recent years, although this literature dates back several decades. With new developments in methods and data availability, tax experiments have gradually moved away from lab settings and towards the field. This movement from the lab to the field has happened against the background of the ‘credibility revolution’ in…

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March 2017

Property Taxation in Developing Countries

by Merima Ali, Odd-Helge Fjeldstad & Lucas Katera

Property tax (PT) raises on average revenues of less than 1 per cent of GDP in developing countries. In many African countries it contributes far less than 0.5 per cent. Following such low contribution, there is a growing eagerness among policy makers to increase its share in GDP. This policy brief provides a theoretical rationale behind such enthusiasm…

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March 2017

Norms, Power, and the Socially Embedded Realities of Market Taxation in Northern Ghana

by Wilson Prichard & Vanessa van den Boogaard

This article provides a ground-level view of market taxation in two local government areas in Ghana’s relatively disadvantaged northern region. It describes a system shaped by informal practices that are grounded in social relationships and collective norms, which sometimes foster greater equity and in other cases serve to reinforce existing inequalities. The evidence suggests the…

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February 2017

Taxing Multinational Enterprises as Unitary Firms

by Sol Picciotto ed.Sol Picciotto

The international tax system needs a paradigm shift. The rules devised over 80 years ago treat the different parts of a multinational enterprise as if they were independent entities, although they also give national tax authorities powers to adjust the accounts of these entities. This creates a perverse incentive for multinationals to create ever more…

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March 2017

Taxing the urban boom: property taxation in Africa

by Odd-Helge Fjeldstad, Merima Ali & Tom Goodfellow

The growth of Africa’s towns and cities has outpaced local governments’ capacity for service delivery in terms of management, infrastructure, and financing. As a result, many African towns and cities are now faced with a governance crisis. The restructuring of governmental functions and finances has entered the core of the development debate. Policy makers are…

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February 2017

The Political Economy of Long-Term Revenue Decline in Sri Lanka

by Mick Moore

From the 1950s to the 1980s, Sri Lankan governments collected a high proportion of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in taxes. They spent most of that money on mass provision of health and education services, and subsidised food. Sri Lanka was a model welfare state, with unusually high human development indicators. Contemporary Sri Lankan governments spend…

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