New digital technologies are now being widely used in Africa and lower-income countries (LICs). This has had an impact on tax administration, which has been increasingly digitised. Specifically Digital Financial Services (DFS) and digital IDs can impro …

Digital financial services (DFS) have rapidly expanded across Africa and other low-income countries. At the same time, low-income countries face strong pressures to increase domestic resource mobilisation, and major challenges in taxing the digital eco …

While much knowledge is being generated on the impact of the pandemic, we still know very little on its implications on taxation in low-income countries. Yet, tax is crucial to fund crisis response and recovery, in addition to broader development plans …

The Value Added Tax (VAT) is the single largest source of revenue in many countries, raising on average about a quarter of total tax collected and almost 40 per cent in African countries. The theoretical case for adopting a VAT, as opposed to other con …

There are substantial differences in the spread of the pandemic and the policy response to it between high- and low-income countries (LICs). In terms of case numbers, the pandemic has affected high and middle-income countries (HICs and MICs) much more …

This paper uses administrative data from Value Added Tax (VAT) returns to provide insights on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in Rwanda. We show that the lockdown in Rwanda had a severe impact on the domestic economy, despite relatively low case nu …

The value added tax (VAT) is supposed to be a tax on consumption that achieves greater economic efficiency than alternative indirect taxes. It is also meant to facilitate enforcement through the ‘self-enforcing mechanism’ – based on opposed incentives …

Nil-filing refers to taxpayers who report zero on all fields of their tax declaration. It is a largely ignored phenomenon in the tax literature, despite being well known to tax administrators. There is almost no evidence on the characteristics of nil-f …

Administrative data from tax returns have recently become available in many African countries thanks to the modernisation of revenue authorities and the digitisation of tax records. The availability of these data has opened new opportunities for policy …

The widespread introduction of information and communication technologies (ICTs) and digitalised data management systems is one of the most important developments among African tax administrations in recent years. However, very little evidence is avail …

This paper reviews existing initiatives on taxpayer education in Africa, an area that has been largely under-researched in the literature. We start by providing an overview of the wide variety of programmes that African revenue authorities have underta …

The literature in this report focused exclusively on high and middle-income countries. This paper begins to fill this gap by reporting on the results of a tax field experiment in Rwanda, while also focusing on some characteristics that may be common to …

Poverty reduction, and more recently inequality, are pressing concerns in many low and middle-income countries. This is not in the least due as a result of the Sustainable Development Goals committing countries to significant improvements by 2030. In o …

Key findings from a pilot field experiment on tax compliance, is discussed in this paper. A key objective of the paper, is to provide lessons learned on implementing this type of study in low-income countries, and reporting initial econometric results. …

The fiscal history of Ethiopia is reviewed in this paper, focusing particularly on the period between 1960 and 2010. The detailed fiscal data is available to underpin the analysis. While reviewing the key fiscal and economic events of this period, part …

This paper analyzes and computes the tax burden on Ethiopian corporations, measured by the average effective tax rate (ETR) on their profit. Our strongest result regards the relation between tax burdens and firm size. There is a statistically significa …

In recent years, tax experiments have been gaining momentum and with new developments in methods and data availability, tax experiments have gradually moved away from lab settings and towards the field. This movement from the lab to the field has happe …