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Showing all content in Public Sector And Tax
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Project
Electricity and public goods provision in Karachi, Pakistan
In large parts of the developing world where democracy and democratic institutions such as legislature, courts and civil society are weakly institutionalised, the provision of public goods to the most disenfranchised members of society falls through the cracks. This project focuses on the privatisation of electricity, a public good that at the turn of the millennia is...
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Publication - Working Paper
Production and evasion responses with limited state capacity: Evidence from major tax reforms in India
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Publication - Policy Brief
Discretion in a bureaucracy: Evidence from Pakistan
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Blog post
Mining taxation policy in Zambia: The tyranny of indecision
Instability, massive increases and novel taxes not seen anywhere in the world’. That is the way the outgoing Zambia Chamber of Mines President, Nathan Chishimba, described the new tax measures targeted at the mining sector in the 2019 budget. The Zambian government has charged that these new measures will ensure that the sector is paying its fair share of taxes, but the...
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Blog post
Building a capable civil service in Liberia: The role of the Performance Management System
Over the past thirty years, Liberia has encountered a mix of challenges, from negotiating civil war and an Ebola epidemic to welcoming the first democratic transition of power in three-quarters of a century. The recently elected Weah administration has made governance one of the four pillars of its ‘Pro-poor Agenda for Prosperity and Development’, including a push to...
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Blog post
Informal workers and taxation in Zambia: Who pays and does it make a difference?
Taxation in Africa has been increasingly covered in the news, especially with controversial attempts in countries such as Benin, Tanzania, and Uganda to tax users of social media sites and phone texting services. While the true intentions of these efforts are debatable, raising sufficient domestic revenue has long been a challenge for many African governments. A long line...
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Data Item
Data: Property tax experiment in Punjab, Pakistan: Testing the role of wages, incentives and audit on tax inspectors’ behaviour
Performance pay for tax collectors has the potential to raise revenues, but might come at a cost if taxpayers face undue pressure from collectors. We report the first large-scale field experiment on these issues, where we experimentally allocated 482 property tax units in Punjab, Pakistan into one of three performance-pay schemes or a control. After two years, incentivized...
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Data Item
Data: The Political economy of sovereign debt overhang
We propose a tractable variant of the open economy neoclassical growth model that emphasizes political economy and contracting frictions. The political economy frictions involve a preference for immediate spending, while the contracting friction is a lack of commitment regarding foreign debt and expropriation. We show that the political economy frictions slow an economy’s...
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Data Item
Data: Multinationals and growth in developing countries
We argue that social capital as proxied by trust increases aggregate productivity by affecting the organization of firms. To do this we collect new data on the decentralization of investment, hiring, production, and sales decisions from Corporate Headquarters to local plant managers in almost 4,000 firms in the United States, Europe, and Asia. We find that firms...
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Project
Informal taxation and revenue mobilisation in Myanmar
Taxation is essential to provide governments with the funds needed to deliver the public goods and services necessary for the social and economic development of a country. However, in Myanmar, the levels of formal taxation are among the lowest in the world, according to the IMF. These low levels are the subject of regularly commentary in the public sphere, often accompanied...