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Project
GRD – Government Revenue Dataset
Theme: Transforming societies
Government revenues from taxation are a critical source of public finances, supporting the fiscal space for economic development and public investments in the United Nations Agenda 2030: Sustainable Development Goals. Despite a large amount of effort to improve revenue collection in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), high-income countries still collect, on average, more than double the share of total revenues than low-income countries.
This project examines the political economy factors which explain the design and structure of tax systems in LMICs, in order to deepen our understanding of how successful tax systems develop, why tax reforms succeed or fail, and why the gap in tax performance between higher and lower income countries persists. This research builds on a body of evidence produced under UNU-WIDER’s 2019–23 work programme on Transforming economies, states, and societies, in particular the work carried out for the Fiscal states – the origins and developmental implications project.
Key questions
- Taxation and the social contract: What are citizens and elites’ preferences for direct and indirect taxation? Does progressive taxation increase tax compliance? How do the elites respond to changes in taxation? When does trust in state institutions increase? Under what conditions do we see a shift from indirect to direct taxation?
- Taxation and the governance dividend: Does taxation improve governance? Which taxes are more likely to produce a governance dividend? Is it taxation on labour or taxation on capital that leads to a governance dividend? Focus on Africa: under what conditions do we see a governance dividend in this region?
- Taxation in resource rich economies: What political institutions may facilitate taxation in resource-abundant countries? Why do such political institutions emerge in some resource-abundant countries and not in others? Do we need these institutions in place prior to the discovery of natural resources? If so, for low-income countries that had already weak institutions of political accountability prior to the discovery of natural resources, how can the fiscal resource curse be avoided?
Watch this space
All requests for research proposals, events, working papers, data updates, and journal articles related to this project will be available here.
This project is part of UNU-WIDER’s Creating the fiscal space for development research area.
This project is part of the Domestic Revenue Mobilization programme.
Project team
Focal points | Kunal Sen
Core researcher | Antonio Savoia
Project coordination | Irais Martinez
Communications | Marie-France Boucher, Tristan Reid
RESOURCES
The Government Revenue Dataset (GRD)
IN PARTNERSHIP
Financial support from the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad)
This project builds on work completed for Fiscal states — origins and development implications
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Journal Article
The effects of taxation on income inequality in sub-Saharan AfricaARTICLE IS ON EARLY VIEW | This study investigates the effects of taxation on income inequality in an unbalanced panel of 45 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa over the period 1980–2018. We use two-stage least squares and the instrumental variables...
Working Paper
Tax revenue data in Africa: the Government Revenue Dataset and African Tax Outlook in comparisonThis 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...
Journal Article
The dynamic effects of aid and taxes on government spendingThis 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...
Blog
Four things to consider to improve public revenues in the Global South: New findings from the Government Revenue DatasetAcross the Global South, governments continue efforts to increase domestic revenues and capacity for public spending. As concerns over debt distress...
Working Paper
Double taxation treaties and resource revenue mobilization in developing countriesDouble taxation treaties, by assigning taxing rights to rival countries and thereby eradicating double taxation, aim to facilitate cross-border trade and investment. The eradication of double taxation is achieved through reductions in withholding tax...
Working Paper
Tax and sustainable development in sub-Saharan AfricaThis 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...
Working Paper
Climate vulnerability and government resource mobilization in developing countriesThere is substantial empirical literature on the impact of climate vulnerability on economic outcomes in developing countries. However, this literature is still weak on the impact of climate vulnerability on tax revenue mobilization. To enrich the...
Working Paper
The effects of taxation on income inequality in sub-Saharan AfricaThis paper investigates the effects of taxation on income inequality in an unbalanced panel of 45 countries in sub-Saharan Africa over the period 1980–2018. We use instrumental-variable two-stage least squares and instrumental-variable quantile...
Working Paper
Domestic revenue mobilization and informalityEffective 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...
Blog
Inequality, fiscal space, and crisis response — A matter of priority, affordability, or both?
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, governments financed more than 5000 fiscal support policies worldwide in 2020–21. The pandemic response is an...
Working Paper
Aid, taxes, and government spendingA 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...
Working Paper
A model to explain the impact of government revenue on the quality of governance and the SDGsThis paper empirically investigates the link between the level of government revenue per capita and six indicators of quality of governance in an unbalanced panel data set consisting of all countries in the world (217) using data from 1980 to 2020...
Working Paper
Does aid fragmentation affect tax revenue dynamics in developing countries?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...
Working Paper
Fiscal consequences of corporate tax avoidanceMultinational 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...
Blog
What can the GRD do for policymakers?
A few months ago, I was asked to deliver a lecture at the Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies on the UNU-WIDER Government Revenue...
Working Paper
Social protection expansions during crisis and fiscal spaceThis 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...
Blog
Data for development
The first of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is to end poverty in all its forms, everywhere. The monumental task — a long-time dream of...
Blog
The tortoise defeats the hare: Does moderate outlast rapid growth in domestic revenue?The past four decades have seen marked improvements in the collection of domestic revenue (tax and non-tax revenues) in many countries of the Global...
Working Paper
The dynamics of domestic revenue mobilization across four decadesWe utilize the recently updated UNU-WIDER Government Revenue Dataset, which covers key indicators on tax and non-tax revenues for 196 countries since the 1980s, to study the dynamics of government revenue tax collection across selected periods from...
Technical Note
Government Revenue Dataset (2021): country notesThis 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...
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Context
Main subject
This project is part of Creating the fiscal space for development research area
This project is part of Domestic Revenue Mobilization programme (phase 2)
Theme: 2024-27, Fiscal space