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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
62 articles, publications, projects, experts...
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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...
Working Paper
Tax effort revisited: new estimates from the Government Revenue DatasetAttention on domestic resource mobilization—particularly in developing countries—has increased significantly in recent years. This stems from, among other things, recognition in the Sustainable Development Goals that further domestic funding is...
Blog
Social protection at a crossroad
How can we ensure a resilient and inclusive recovery from COVID-19? How can we hold on to the target of eradicating poverty and hunger by 2030, with...
Technical Note
Government Revenue Dataset (2021): variable descriptionThis 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...
Technical Note
Government Revenue Dataset (2021): source selectionThis 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...
Blog
How global tax dodging costs lives: New research shows a direct link to increased death ratesTax abuse is an expensive business. According to a recent report by the Tax Justice Network, avoiding or evading tax deprives governments across the...
Blog
Data for better tax policy analysis: Introducing the latest version of the Government Revenue Dataset
Thanks to the updated version of the Government Revenue Dataset (GRD) we are now able to gain a clear picture of tax and other revenue trends in over...
Blog
Revenue data like you’ve never seen it before: Introducing the GRD Explorer
Let’s face it, data is important. It sits at the core of almost everything that we in the development economics research community do. However, the...
Working Paper
Toward closer cohesion of international tax statisticsThe Government Revenue Dataset (GRD) was launched in September 2014 and, in the few years since, has gone on to be recognized as the go-to source for researchers and policy makers seeking cross-country data on government revenues and taxes. However...
Blog
Domestic revenue mobilization and the role of data
Government revenues are central to funding public expenditures in all countries. Increasingly, developing countries must look to raise domestic...
Blog
Updated Government Revenue Dataset provides new insights into developing country tax collection trends
The increasing focus on domestic resource mobilization in developing countries means that, for researchers and policy makers, access to accurate and...
Blog
Tax, development and the SDGs: How we are supporting the data revolution
At the core of efforts to meet the Sustainable Development Goals lies a commitment to enhance domestic revenue mobilization. Strengthening capacity to...
Working Paper
Party system institutionalization and reliance on personal income taxThis paper explores the effect of party system institutionalization on the reliance of tax systems on the personal income tax. As a first step, the paper re-examines the relationship between party system institutionalization and taxation patterns...
Working Paper
Natural resources' impact on government revenuesMotivated by the fact that the taxation of natural resources is both crucial and particularly challenging for developing countries, this paper draws on a unique dataset to produce empirical evidence on two issues pertaining to the fiscal impact of...
Working Paper
Does the political resource curse affect public finance?This paper explores the extent to which government revenue is affected by external shocks, and whether these effects are different for resource-rich as compared with non-resource-rich countries. We are particularly interested in the fate of poorer...
Working Paper
Tax revenues in transition countriesChanges 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...
Working Paper
Fiscal decentralization and the shadow economyIn this paper we use the new Government Revenue Dataset to analyse fiscal decentralization. We find that developed countries are on average more decentralized than developing countries and that Asia, Europe and North America are among the most...
Working Paper
Are taxes good for your health?The global framework for financing development, adopted in 2015, places great emphasis on mobilizing domestic resources to finance the Sustainable Development Goals, which include universal healthcare. In a recent paper Reeves et al. (2015) attribute...
Working Paper
Tax revenue mobilization in conflict-affected developing countriesHow does conflict affect tax revenue mobilization? This paper uses a newly updated dataset to explore longitudinal trends of tax revenue mobilization prior to, during, and after conflict periods in a selection of conflict-affected states since 1980...
Working Paper
On the mobilization of domestic resources in oil countriesThis paper investigates the sources of variability in the mobilization of domestic tax revenue in oil-producing countries. It argues that the type of natural resources exploited during colonial rule can affect the contemporary levels of domestic tax...
Working Paper
Tax structures and economic growthRecent work on the relationship between tax structure and economic growth has offered little reliable evidence for developing countries. Yet it is in such countries where the greatest changes in tax structure not only have been seen over the past 30...
Working Paper
Taxation, infrastructure, and firm performance in developing countriesThis paper investigates the relationship between taxation and firm performance in developing countries. Taking firm-level data from the World Bank Enterprise Surveys (WBES) and tax data from the Government Revenue Dataset (ICTD/UNU-WIDER), our...
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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