Report
SOUTHMOD country report Mozambique - MOZMOD v1.0
View the latest MOZMOD country report here. This report documents MOZMOD, the SOUTHMOD model developed for Mozambique. This work was carried out by the Ministry of Economy and Finance of Mozambique in collaboration with the project partners in the...
Report
SOUTHMOD country report Ecuador - ECUAMOD v1.0
View the latest ECUAMOD country report here. This report documents ECUAMOD, the SOUTHMOD micrososimulation model developed for Ecuador. This work was carried out by the ISER in collaboration with the Instituto de Altos Estudios Nacionales and UNU...
Report
SOUTHMOD country report Zambia - MicroZAMOD v1.0
View the latest MicroZAMOD country report here. This report documents MicroZAMOD, the SOUTHMOD model developed for Zambia. This work was carried out by Zambia Institute for Policy Analysis & Research (ZIPAR) in collaboration with the project partners...
Blog
Tax, development and the SDGs: How we are supporting the data revolution
by
Kyle McNabb
June 2017
At the core of efforts to meet the Sustainable Development Goals lies a commitment to enhance domestic revenue mobilization. Strengthening capacity to...
Blog
Updated Government Revenue Dataset provides new insights into developing country tax collection trends
by
Kyle McNabb
October 2017
The increasing focus on domestic resource mobilization in developing countries means that, for researchers and policy makers, access to accurate and...
Blog
Domestic revenue mobilization and the role of data
by
James Stewart
October 2017
Government revenues are central to funding public expenditures in all countries. Increasingly, developing countries must look to raise domestic...
Report
SOUTHMOD country report Ghana - GHAMOD v1.0
View the latest GHAMOD country report here. This report documents GHAMOD, the SOUTHMOD model developed for Ghana. This work was carried out by the Institute of Statistical, Social and Economic Research (ISSER) and the University of Tampere in...
Working Paper
Toward closer cohesion of international tax statistics
The 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...
Report
SOUTHMOD country report Ethiopia - ETMOD v1.0
View the latest ETMOD country report here. This report documents ETMOD, the SOUTHMOD model developed for Ethiopia. This work was carried out by the Ethiopian Development Research Institute (EDRI) in collaboration with the University of Essex and the...
Blog
Research that matters: A report from the stakeholder workshop - 15 November 2018, Pretoria, South Africa
I found myself in the third-floor conference rooms of a Pretoria hotel for a meeting with economists, researchers, and policymakers involved in the SA...
Technical Note
Dealing with the oversimulation of taxes and benefits in SOUTHMOD microsimulation models
SOUTHMOD tax-benefit microsimulation models may in some cases oversimulate taxes or benefits, generating greater expenditure, a greater number of beneficiaries, or greater amounts of taxes or taxpayers than reported in administrative data. Drawing on...
Working Paper
Distributional impacts of agricultural policies in Zambia
This paper examines the distributional impacts of agricultural policies versus those of cash transfers using a tax–benefit microsimulation model for Zambia for the policy year 2020. The analysis also considers the behavioural impacts of input...
Journal Article
The dominant role of large firms in profit shifting
Globally, the largest 0.001 per cent of frms earn one-third of all corporate profts. Nonetheless, there is little understanding of how proft shifting difers across frm size. Using the universe of South African corporate tax returns and global...
Working Paper
Understanding Somalia’s social contract and state-building efforts
Building on a World Bank regional study in Africa aiming at measuring social contracts concepts and within the framework of reflecting on future donor interventions, this paper applies social contracts measurement and complements with qualitative...
Report
SOUTHMOD country report Tanzania - TAZMOD v2.5
View the latest TAZMOD country report here. This report documents TAZMOD, the SOUTHMOD model developed for Tanzania. It describes the different tax–benefit policies in place, how the microsimulation model picks up these different provisions, and the...
Report
SOUTHMOD country report Ethiopia - ETMOD v3.0
This report documents ETMOD, the SOUTHMOD model developed for Ethiopia. The Ethiopian national team currently includes Adnan A. Shahir, Abas Mohammed Ali, and Francesco Figari, who are responsible for the 2022 model update and this report. The...
Report
SOUTHMOD country report Tanzania - TAZMOD v2.8
This report documents TAZMOD, the SOUTHMOD model developed for Tanzania Mainland. It describes the different tax–benefit policies in place, how the microsimulation model picks up these different provisions, and the database on which the model runs...
Working Paper
Tax provisioning by extractive industry multinational subsidiaries
Extractive industries are spread across mining of metal and minerals, oil and gas, among others. Multinationals in these sectors are confronted with different challenges ranging from corruption, political risk, economic uncertainty, sunk costs, and...
Blog
Empirical research is crucial for better tax enforcement in the developing world
I had the privilege to participate in the UNU-WIDER Winter School as one of the lecturers. In this blog, I explain my main takeaways for students and...
Blog
Direct support to small scale farmers reduces poverty: What Zambia is doing right
Over half of Zambia’s population lived below the national poverty line in 2015. In rural areas, where 89% of households are engaged in agriculture...
Report
SOUTHMOD country report Ethiopia - ETMOD v2.3
View the latest ETMOD country report here. This report documents ETMOD, the SOUTHMOD model developed for Ethiopia. Since 2020 the Ethiopian national team is based at the University of Insubria (Italy). It includes Adnan A. Shahir and Francesco Figari...
Working Paper
Glimpses of fiscal states in sub-Saharan Africa
There is a widespread perception that taxing in sub-Saharan Africa has been and remains fraught with problems or government failure. This is not generally true. For more than a century, colonial administrations and independent states have steadily...
Report
SOUTHMOD country report Tanzania - TAZMOD v2.1
View the latest TAZMOD country report here. This report documents TAZMOD, the SOUTHMOD model developed for Tanzania. This work was carried out by University of Dar es Salaam in collaboration with the project partners in the scope of the SOUTHMOD...
Working Paper
Tax effort revisited: new estimates from the Government Revenue Dataset
Attention 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...
Working Paper
The dynamics of domestic revenue mobilization across four decades
We 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...
Blog
The tortoise defeats the hare: Does moderate outlast rapid growth in domestic revenue?
by
Annalena Oppel, Kyle McNabb
February 2022
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 guide to the CIT-IRP5 panel version 4.0
This paper presents version 4.0 of the CIT-IRP5 firm-level panel dataset. Version 4.0 is the latest edition of the firm-level component of the combined administrative data using sources from the South African Revenue Service. We show that differences...
Blog
Estimating tax avoidance: New findings, new questions
by
Alex Cobham
March 2017
There are now a range of estimates of the global scale of tax avoidance. These include: the $600 billion annual tax loss estimated by IMF researchers...
Blog
Opening the vault: Data, research, and improved policymaking in South Africa
by
James Stewart
March 2017
Policymakers often work in the dark, as they try to make real impact on people’s lives. If you don’t have good data, being worked on by good...
Blog
Microsimulation models for developing countries: An interview with Jukka Pirttilä
by
Heikki Laurinolli
March 2017
The University of Tampere is participating in an international project in which a microsimulation model is being drafted for the evaluation of the...
Working Paper
Estimating profit shifting in South Africa using firm-level tax returns
Using the universe of South African corporate tax returns for 2009–14, we estimate profit- and debt-shifting responses in South Africa. We find evidence that South African subsidiaries engage in profit shifting and that profit-shifting responses to...
Research Brief
Revenue losses from tax-motivated mispricing in South Africa
New research provides the first direct evidence of tax-motivated transfer mispricing in a developing country. Using highly detailed firm-level customs data from the tax authority, the analysis calculates the difference between legitimate estimates of...