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Showing all content in Public Sector And Tax
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Publication - Policy Brief
Rebuilding the social compact: Urban service delivery and property taxes in Pakistan
If citizens perceive little benefit from their tax payments, or if local services are disconnected from local decision-making, the social compact between citizen and state can be broken, thus creating a vicious cycle of low quality services, low levels of local tax revenue, and lack of trust in the state. This study, conducted with neighbourhoods in two of the...
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Blog post
Collecting tax revenue in Uganda: The carrot and stick story
Text messages focused on enforcement and information are most effective at collecting tax revenue, while encouragement affects the average taxpayer only with visible benefits. We collaborated with the Ugandan Revenue Authority to test whether and what types of text message reminders help raise government revenue. Specifically, we used an experiment to test how effective...
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Project
Investigating FDI linkages in developing countries
Foreign investment into Uganda has been increasing in recent years. However, the extent to which this investment is yielding significant returns for the local economy is uncertain. To date, there is little known about the differential performance and impact of foreign firms in Uganda, and therefore limited evidence from which to design policies to make the most of Foreign...
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Blog post
Can consumer incentive schemes enhance VAT revenue collections in developing countries?
There has been a resurgence in the adoption of consumer incentive schemes within the realm of revenue collection in recent years, due in part to technological advancement, digitisation of records, and the rise in digital payment platforms such as mobile money. These schemes can help address evasive practices that some retail firms currently engage in. Their success however,...
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Publication - Miscellaneous
Empirical research on taxation in Uganda
This note summarises discussions and presentations from an afternoon seminar held by the Uganda Revenue Authority (URA) and the IGC on the 15th April 2021. The aim of the event was to share and discuss findings from ongoing research projects conducted jointly by personnel from the URA and the IGC.
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Project
Improving tax compliance in Freetown, Sierra Leone
A pre-condition for sustained public service provision is the mobilisation of reliable tax revenues to pay for these public services, often referred to as fiscal capacity. There is extensive literature examining tax mobilisation and compliance in developed countries, where fiscal capacity is already high due to pre-existing norms around compliance. However, it has little to...
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Blog post
BREAD 2021: Insights on governance
The IGC hosted the BREAD Conference on Economics of Africa from 7-9 July and our new blog series explores key findings from research presented during the conference, including the following publicly available papers on governance. Some interesting findings are below. Good governance is complex, not least because the number of different actors involved: politicians,...
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Blog post
The value of a ‘seat at the table’: Elite interference in Lebanon’s public procurement
Elites in weak bureaucracies have ample incentives to interfere in public procurement. New research from Lebanon shows how billions of dollars in foreign infrastructure funding are more likely to be contracted to firms that are politically well-connected. To improve public infrastructure procurement, greater accountability from elites is needed. The explosion at...
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Publication - Project Report
Public infrastructure procurement in post-conflict power-sharing arrangements: Evidence from Lebanon’s Council for Development and Reconstruction
Post-conflict power-sharing arrangements not only allocate political power but also economic resources among powerful elites. Previous research on such economic arrangements has largely focused on the access of powerful elites to natural resources, such as to oil fields or mines. This article investigates the mechanisms of rent allocation of another major source of...
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Blog post
The compliance challenge: Raising property tax revenues in Kampala
Property taxes are an important potential source of revenue for cities. Faced with limited municipal revenues and rapidly growing populations, taxes on the value of land and property can offer a significant source of funding for cities to provide local services and to tap into financing for larger investments. Recent improvements to the tax administration system in Kampala...