Developing countries that experience commodity booms struggle to mobilize sustainable tax revenues. Emerging literature on the subject notwithstanding, there is limited exploration of the specific types of institutions critical for improving fiscal...
This technical note is part of a series of technical notes describing the construction of the Government Revenue Dataset (GRD). This document specifically focuses on the composition of variables in the GRD (version August 2021) and across the...
This technical note is part of a series of technical notes describing the construction of the Government Revenue Dataset (GRD). We provide an overview of the underlying sources in the GRD and the criteria used in order to select data from them. In...
The problem of debt bias can be tackled through either disincentivizing the use of debt financing or incentivizing the use of equity financing. Considering the South African context—in which many firms are highly leveraged and the marginal effective...
The ability to raise revenues from taxes – called “fiscal capacity” – is a crucial aspect for the functioning of any state. Being able to tax citizens...
Part of Journal Special Issue Fiscal state capacity
This paper simulates the impact of the global minimum corporate tax rate (GMCTR) in Uganda by estimating the difference between the mechanical and the behavioural changes in tax revenue. Overall, implementation of GMCTR will increase tax revenue, and...
Taxation can contribute to state-building through a tax bargain in which taxpayers are willing to increase compliance in return for improved government accountability. There is limited evidence for this in sub-Saharan Africa where it is argued that...
In several low- and middle-income countries with important extractive sectors, gross national income has developed favourably. Africa has benefitted most, particularly West Africa. This survey provides an up-to-date statistical analysis of the...
Part of Book Extractive Industries
Part of Journal Special Issue Fiscal Policy, State Building and Economic Development
Building on the literature of the political economy of taxation, this article explores the relationship between political competition and tax revenues using a sample of 89 developing countries from 1988 to 2010. Owing to the inertia of tax variables...
This technical note is the third in a series based on the UNU-WIDER Government Revenue Dataset (GRD). The preceding notes have described in detail the variables contained within the GRD and the source selection procedures. In this technical note, we...
We argue that tax revenues and political institutions placing constraints on the executive power may reinforce each other over time and so co-evolve in the long run. This may also bring a shift in the composition of revenues, from taxes levied on a...
Effective domestic revenue mobilization has gained renewed urgency, especially in the light of the need to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic. In taxation debates, the ‘informal sectors’ have hitherto been assumed to be a part of the problem and...
The COVID-19 pandemic showed that many developing countries could not respond effectively to crises due to their limited capacity to diversify their social protection responses. Social protection systems depend mainly on government tax revenue...
Developing countries need to raise sufficient tax revenue to finance development. Revenue mobilization is often hampered by limited tax compliance, weak institutions, and technical problems with tax collection. One solution to these challenges is...
This article examines the impact of foreign aid and taxes on government spending for 67 developing countries during 1980–2013 using dynamic heterogeneous (panel) time-series techniques. We find that spending, aid and tax ratios comprise an...
This study provides a first attempt to contribute a large-scale assessment of whether crisis response as observed during the COVID-19 pandemic can serve as a feasible blueprint for creating durable solutions across countries. Adopting a lens on...
Multinational corporations shift a large share of their foreign profits to tax havens and, due to this corporate tax avoidance, governments worldwide lose a portion of their tax revenues. In this paper we study the consequences of multinational tax...
There exists a burgeoning empirical literature on the impact of aid fragmentation on development outcomes in aid-receiving countries, with it being widely recognized that aid fragmentation is deleterious. This paper adds to the existing literature by...
A substantial amount of aid to developing countries is given to the government, or goes through the budget, meaning it should have an impact on government fiscal behaviour (particularly on government spending). The few existing empirical studies on...
This paper compares two important sources of tax revenue statistics for African countries, namely the Africa Tax Administration Forum’s African Tax Outlook and the United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research's...
Rising globalization has exerted a downward pressure on global tariffs, thereby eroding tariff revenues in developing nations. We analyse how gains from lowering import tariffs are distributed within the firm and the corresponding tax (base)...
This paper establishes how accountability quality might mediate the effect of tax revenue on sustainable development in 41 sub-Saharan African countries for the period 1990–2019. The empirical evidence is based on three empirical strategies...
Changes in the tax structure and category of taxes clearly matter when it comes to initiating tax policies. This paper employs data from a sample of 33 transitional countries over the period 1991–2014. It finds that, in a particular transitional...
Join the network
