This paper estimates the distribution of personal wealth in South Africa by combining tax microdata, household surveys, and macroeconomic balance sheet statistics. We systematically compare estimates of the wealth distribution obtained by direct...
Monetary policy affects the real economy through various channels, including the interest rate, exchange rate, credit, and asset price channels. The credit channel has recently received considerable attention. Small firms are more sensitive to...
We evaluate a major personal income tax reform in Uganda that came into effect in 2012–13. The reform increased the tax-free lower threshold, increased tax rates for higher incomes, and introduced an additional highest tax band. Using the universe of...
This paper conducts an impact evaluation of the effects of two tax administration interventions—a taxpayer register expansion and education programme, and a new electronic filing system for presumptive tax—on the number of small business taxpayers...
Based on tax records data from Ecuador, we analyse gender differences in top income groups from 2008 to 2017. Ecuador represents an interesting case as it shares many trends with other countries in the region in terms of women’s status in the labour...
Introduction: data for development Globally, one of the key factors associated with increasing use of data to inform policy-making has been the increased availability of new administrative data sources. In 2014, the National Treasury of South Africa...
While technical assistance and increased use of ICT in the area of tax administration have been regarded to hold considerable promise for greater revenue collection, the evidence on how these activities work in the real-world circumstances of...
Overall income inequality in South Africa is very high, and inequality generated in the labour market is a key driver of inequality.In this paper, I use the Post-Apartheid Labour Market Series, the General Household Surveys, and administrative tax...
South Africa is, by most contemporary measures, the most unequal country in the world. Yet, relatively little attention has been given to country’s wealth inequality. It is crucial to accurately measure the concentration of wealth inequality over...
This paper presents version 4.0 of the CIT-IRP5 firm-level panel dataset. Version 4.0 is the latest edition of the firm-level component of the combined administrative data using sources from the South African Revenue Service. We show that differences...
We update Kreuser and Newman’s (2018) total factor productivity estimates for the South African manufacturing sector using administrative data from 2009–17. We use standard implementations of the Ackerberg et al. (2015) and Wooldridge (2009)...
How can we determine the taxation of wage earners or multinational corporations in a fair manner? Will simplifying tax administration help increase...
The availability of anonymized individual tax return data can contribute to a deeper understanding of the drivers behind the high levels of inequality and unemployment in South Africa. In the recent past, researchers have examined either payroll or...
The paper examines the incidence and employment impacts of the Employment Tax Incentive, a South African wage subsidy system that is targeted at the employers of low-wage youth. The paper uses a triple differences strategy and survey and...
This paper has three primary objectives. First, it provides a broad overview of the available South African data used to examine gender in the labour market, with specific reference to the South African Revenue Services (SARS) tax data which has...
Monetary policy is believed to have a disproportionate effect on firms, depending on their size. Financially constrained firms with limited access to capital markets are expected to be more sensitive to changes in interest rates; this is...
Understanding wealth inequality has unique significance in South Africa. The co-existence of extreme poverty and extreme wealth is starkly visible. Apartheid-era inequality has persisted despite more than 20 years of democracy. Much of the research...
Traditionally, analysts of the South African labour market have used household survey data to describe earnings and employment in the post-Apartheid period. More recently, administrative data from the South African Revenue Service has been made...
We investigate how the arrival and expansion of mobile network access in Uganda influences firm tax behaviour. Access to mobile technologies could broaden government revenues from corporate income tax through the extensive margin: by reducing the...
We evaluate a major personal income tax reform in Uganda that came into effect in 2012–13, contributing to the scarce literature on the effects of personal income tax reform on employees’ income in a low-income country in Africa. The reform increased...
We use individual-level tax administrative data to estimate personal income inequality among the tax-compliant population in South Africa over the period 2011–21. Our results indicate that inequality of this population rose slightly over the period...
Over 60 years ago, Guy Orcutt and colleagues pioneered the use of microsimulation models in the social sciences to analyse the impact of social and economic policies. Although computational and data constraints initially hampered progress, these...
This technical note describes the Uganda Revenue Authority (URA) Pay-As-You-Earn (PAYE) data covering financial years 2013/14 to 2021/22. PAYE is paid by an employer who withholds personal income tax on employees’ wages and other employment incomes...
Uganda has one of the lowest corporate income tax collection rates in sub-Saharan Africa, while offering generous corporate tax incentives. It is unclear whether tax incentives achieve their objectives without primarily benefiting firms, potentially...
This paper evaluates the impacts of combining household surveys with income tax return files, in terms of growth, inequality, and social welfare in Brazil from 2007 to 2015. This exercise holds the promise of adding more realistic top income values...
Public debate on the temporary employment services, or labour broker, sector in South Africa has focused on temporary workers’ wages and benefits. Empirical research is limited: temporary employment services cannot be accurately identified in recent...
Labour market analysis in the South African context provides a relatively robust understanding of the individual characteristics that influence wage differentials across workers (i.e. supply-side characteristics), but provides relatively little...
Attempts to regulate the temporary employment sector have had mixed results internationally. In South Africa, temporary employment was regulated in 2015 through amendments to the Labour Relations Act. This paper uses administrative data to examine...
This paper documents the industry classification variables in the anonymized tax microdata available for research at the National Treasury Secure Data Facility in Pretoria. It discusses how the variables in the data are related to the raw records...
In 2016, we joined a project in South Africa working to make tax data available for research purposes. Tax authorities collect an enormous amount of...
Can tax research be inspiring? Looking back at the three years of collaboration between UNU-WIDER and the Uganda Revenue Authority (URA), the answer...
Finland aims to raise the amount of its development assistance to 0.7% of GDP, and this goal has good grounds. But how can we make sure that the...
This paper examines how formal firms have been impacted by and recovered from the pandemic by drawing on two distinct but complementary data sources. This is the first attempt to use both survey and tax administrative data to measure the initial...
This technical note describes the Uganda Revenue Authority (URA) firm panel, which is constructed from administrative corporate income tax (CIT) returns and firm registration data for the financial years 2013/14–2019/20. The panel dataset contains...
This paper aims to assess the extent to which top earners in Ecuador were affected by the COVID-19 crisis compared to other segments of the population.Our analysis uses administrative data for individuals affiliated to social security between January...
Sub-Saharan Africa has abundant natural resources and a substantial market, with an estimated population of 1.2 billion. The population is projected...
Technical assistance and increased use of ICT in tax administrations hold promise for greater revenue collection. Yet, the evidence on how these activities work in the real-world circumstances of developing countries is scant. The paper attempts to...
This Technical Note describes Ugandan trade data covering import and export declarations for ten calendar years from January 2013 to December 2022, constructed from transactional-level Ugandan administrative data. The trade data series contains...
This paper studies the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on formal sector employment in Uganda. Utilizing employee-level administrative tax data from the Uganda Revenue Authority, we describe the dynamics of employment as the pandemic evolved, seeking...
THIS ARTICLE IS ON EARLY VIEW | This study examines how formal firms have been impacted by and recovered from the COVID-19 pandemic, by drawing on two distinct but complementary data sources. This is the first attempt to use both survey and tax...
This technical note describes the Uganda Revenue Authority (URA) presumptive tax returns data covering financial years from 2015/16 to 2022/23. The data contains 21 variables, including information on taxpayers’ characteristics, turnover, and payable...
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