South Africa exhibits extreme levels of income inequality and is ranked as one of the most unequal countries in the world. In order to measure these severe levels of inequality, it matters how we account for the different parts of the income...
Part of Journal Special Issue Fiscal Policy, State Building and Economic Development
This paper evaluates the impacts of combining household surveys with income tax return files, in terms of growth, inequality, and social welfare in Brazil from 2007 to 2015. This exercise holds the promise of adding more realistic top income values...
We synthesize the findings from several recent papers on South Africa’s very high income inequality. These papers use new datasets—including income tax data—and new empirical methods to investigate the drivers of household income and individual...
South Africa has the highest rate of measured inequality in the world. Often thought to be a legacy of the apartheid system, inequality in South Africa has stubbornly persisted. South Africa’s position as highest inequality country in the world has...
We evaluate a major personal income tax reform in Uganda that came into effect in 2012–13, contributing to the scarce literature on the effects of personal income tax reform on employees’ income in a low-income country in Africa. The reform increased...
This technical note describes the Uganda Revenue Authority (URA) Pay-As-You-Earn (PAYE) data covering financial years 2013/14 to 2021/22. PAYE is paid by an employer who withholds personal income tax on employees’ wages and other employment incomes...
We evaluate a major personal income tax reform in Uganda that came into effect in 2012–13. The reform increased the tax-free lower threshold, increased tax rates for higher incomes, and introduced an additional highest tax band. Using the universe of...
In this paper we explore South Africa’s personal income tax system using two microsimulation models. The first, SAMOD, simulates personal income tax and social benefits using a dataset derived from the nationally representative National Income...
This paper analyses the macroeconomic effect of legislated personal income tax changes in South Africa over the 1996–2019 period. We identify personal income tax shocks using a narrative approach and incorporate these shocks in a proxySVAR model. Our...
How can we determine the taxation of wage earners or multinational corporations in a fair manner? Will simplifying tax administration help increase...
Tax administration statistics now provide considerably more complete and reliable measures of South African personal income and its distribution than the available household or other survey sources. However, there are difficulties in using tax data...
In this paper we explore options for augmenting South Africa’s personal income tax revenue using two microsimulation models: PITMOD simulates the personal income tax system and is underpinned by a dataset comprising a full extract of anonymized...
Improving tax systems is important for multiple reasons. For Kenya, finding ways to mobilize domestic revenue streams is critical to cutting the...
Over 60 years ago, Guy Orcutt and colleagues pioneered the use of microsimulation models in the social sciences to analyse the impact of social and economic policies. Although computational and data constraints initially hampered progress, these...
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