The Politics of Taxation and Tax Reform in Times of Crisis: Covid-19 and Attitudes Towards Taxation in Sierra Leone
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Research in Brief 95
A key question facing governments is whether the pandemic has changed attitudes towards taxation and what this means for tax reform. Given that the history of tax policy in high-income countries reveals a link between periods of crisis and significant shifts in attitudes towards taxation, could the same be true in low-income countries? Little research has been done on this potential dynamic and taxpayer perceptions of progressive tax reform in these contexts is not well understood. In this paper we explore the impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic on attitudes toward taxation and unpack what the crisis reveals about the dynamics and politics of taxation. We use novel survey data from Sierra Leone collected before the pandemic, shortly after the pandemic’s onset, and for almost a year afterwards. Summary of Working Paper 166.
Vanessa van den Boogaard 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.
Wilson Prichard is an Associate Professor at the University of Toronto, a Research Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies, Chair of the Local Government Revenue Initiative (LoGRI) and former Executive Officer of the International Centre for Tax and Development (2020-2024). His research focuses on the relationship between taxation and citizen demands for improved governance in sub-Saharan Africa.
Nicolas Orgeira is a a Doctoral Fellow with the Local Government Initiative (LoGRI), an initiative of ICTD based at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto.
Citation: van den Boogaard, V.; Prichard, W., and Orgeira, N. (2023) The Politics of Taxation and Tax Reform in Times of Crisis: Covid-19 and Attitudes Towards Taxation in Sierra Leone, ICTD Research in Brief 95, Brighton: Institute of Development Studies, DOI: 10.19088/ICTD.2023.042
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