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Publications (38)
While multinational corporations (MNCs) make up only 1.9% of firms operating in Uganda, they are overrepresented among tax holiday beneficiaries. New estimates reveal that Uganda’s revenue losses due to these tax expenditures peaked at USD 42 million in 2020.A new dataset allows for the first...
Improving tax systems is important for multiple reasons. For Kenya, finding ways to mobilize domestic revenue streams is critical to cutting the vicious cycle of indebtedness that keeps the country tied to external partners. Correct knowledge of the gaps in tax payment helps to identify solutions...
Journal Article
– Insights from survey and tax administrative data in Zambia
THIS ARTICLE IS ON EARLY VIEW | This study examines how formal firms have been impacted by and recovered from the COVID-19 pandemic, by drawing on two distinct but complementary data sources. This is the first attempt to use both survey and tax administrative data to measure the impact of the...
Working Paper
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This paper studies the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on formal sector employment in Uganda. Utilizing employee-level administrative tax data from the Uganda Revenue Authority, we describe the dynamics of employment as the pandemic evolved, seeking to better understand the various coping strategies...
Technical Note
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This Technical Note describes Ugandan trade data covering import and export declarations for ten calendar years from January 2013 to December 2022, constructed from transactional-level Ugandan administrative data. The trade data series contains transaction-level ten datasets on imports and ten on...
– Combining tax data and Google Street View images
The issue of tax non-compliance among businesses is pervasive in many developing economies, including Uganda. But to what extent do businesses comply with their tax obligations in the capital city, Kampala? Can the local environment and geographic information help predict the risk of tax non...
Working Paper
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– Challenges and prospects for Uganda
This paper simulates the impact of the global minimum corporate tax rate (GMCTR) in Uganda by estimating the difference between the mechanical and the behavioural changes in tax revenue. Overall, implementation of GMCTR will increase tax revenue, and the revenue increase is inversely proportional to...
Working Paper
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– Evidence from Kampala, Uganda
This paper investigates business tax compliance in a multilevel tax structure with limited coordination. We study the case of Kampala, where firms are taxed at national and local levels—by the Uganda Revenue Authority and the Kampala Capital City Authority, respectively—and where the agencies...
Working Paper
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Uganda has one of the lowest corporate income tax collection rates in sub-Saharan Africa, while offering generous corporate tax incentives. It is unclear whether tax incentives achieve their objectives without primarily benefiting firms, potentially undermining domestic revenue mobilization and...
Technical Note
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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 like benefits and allowances. The data are...
– How collaboration can help
UNU-WIDER has worked for several years in collaboration with sub-Saharan African revenue authorities to facilitate the analysis of digital tax data. During a visit to Kampala, Uganda this year, we asked our colleagues how this collaboration has been useful to them. How do they see their role going...
Working Paper
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– Evidence from Uganda
We investigate how the arrival and expansion of mobile network access in Uganda influences firm tax behaviour. Access to mobile technologies could broaden government revenues from corporate income tax through the extensive margin: by reducing the costs of formalization, it could increase the number...
Working Paper
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– Evidence from personal income tax reform in Uganda
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 the tax-free lower threshold, increased tax rates...
Zambia is putting in place fiscal measures to improve the efficient collection of domestic revenue to finance social and public infrastructure. This analysis shows how much more revenue can be accumulated if tax evasion was at the bare minimum. Tax gap describes the share of the potential tax...
Along with several other African countries, Zambia has introduced a withholding system for value-added tax (VAT) to improve revenue collection and compliance. Even though VAT withholding policies are applied in several countries in Africa and similar industry-specific policies in Europe, empirical...
Working Paper
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– A bottom-up approach based on audit assessments
Assessing tax gaps—the difference between the potential and actual taxes raised—plays a vital role in achieving positive domestic revenue objectives through improved and reformed taxation. This is particularly pertinent for growth outcomes in developing countries. This study uses a bottom-up...
Working Paper
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Improving tax collection is essential if developing economies are to avoid over-reliance on external donor funds and loans. Revenue authorities in the Global South have recently adopted new policy tools to improve domestic revenue mobilization through taxes.One such new policy is a withholding...
– A game changer for efficient and fair taxation
In May 2022, the Uganda Revenue Authority (URA) and UNU-WIDER collaboratively launched a secure research data laboratory facility in Kampala, Uganda. The research lab is the second of its kind on the African continent in providing secure access to the revenue authority’s administrative tax data. The...
Working Paper
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– Looking for opportunities to strengthen trust in government and tax compliance by analysing citizens' perception of governance
The COVID-19 pandemic showed that many developing countries could not respond effectively to crises due to their limited capacity to diversify their social protection responses. Social protection systems depend mainly on government tax revenue capacity. Raising domestic revenue still represents a...
Working Paper
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– Individual impacts of the Employment Tax Incentive
This paper uses survey and tax administrative data to analyse the effects of a sizeable employer-borne payroll tax credit for young, low-wage workers in South Africa. We find limited impact of the wage subsidy on employment of young, low-wage workers relative to two comparison groups: slightly older...
The importance of conducting high-quality analysis for policy advice cannot be understated. The UNU-WIDER Winter School for tax policy research delivered the right tools for my day-to-day work. I’m an economist working as a Senior Policy Analyst in the Policy Planning and Research Department of the...
My motivation for doing economics research comes from the wish to see every human being have their basic needs met and enjoy their life. My interest is in public economics. This knowledge helps me to analyze how state economic policies affect the population and thus helps me find the best policies...
– One of the best global training programmes in tax research
Across Africa, governments are now waking up to the fact that taxation targets or economic development goals will not be met without policies that are based on scientific evidence. More effective revenue collection is required to achieve broad-based growth and fiscal sustainability. This paradigm...
– Evidence from tax administrative and survey data in Zambia
Like most other countries, the government of Zambia introduced restrictions to control COVID-19, which considerably curtailed normal economic activity. A new WIDER and World Bank working paper, a multi-institutional collaboration of UNU-WIDER, the World Bank, the Zambia Revenue Authority and the...
Working Paper
pdf
– Insights from survey and tax administrative data in Zambia
This paper examines how formal firms have been impacted by and recovered from the pandemic by drawing on two distinct but complementary data sources. This is the first attempt to use both survey and tax administrative data to measure the initial decline and subsequent recovery of firm sales and...
Technical Note
pdf
This technical note describes the Uganda Revenue Authority (URA) firm panel, which is constructed from administrative corporate income tax (CIT) returns and firm registration data for the financial years 2013/14–2019/20. The panel dataset contains over 300 variables, which allow the user to study...
Working Paper
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Developing countries need to raise sufficient tax revenue to finance development. Revenue mobilization is often hampered by limited tax compliance, weak institutions, and technical problems with tax collection. One solution to these challenges is person-to-government (P2G) mobile phone payments...
Working Paper
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We use income data from tax registers at the Uganda Revenue Authority from 2011 to 2017 to estimate top income inequality, focusing on the very top—the top 1, 0.1, and 0.01 per cent of the income distribution. The focus on the extreme top is facilitated by access to population data on formal sector...
– Taxation in developing countries can be improved through collaboration
Finland aims to raise the amount of its development assistance to 0.7% of GDP, and this goal has good grounds. But how can we make sure that the countries receiving the donor funding will not stay dependent on the external aid for a long time?Just like rich countries, in the long run developing...
– New perspectives on travelling for research
Working for an international organisation presents a host of challenges, given the vast nature of tasks that one must surmount in a fast paced and changing environment. It might be a roller coaster, but also satisfying by providing many worthwhile experiences. The latter was my sensation during my...
– Evidence from risk-based tax examinations
Risk-based approaches are becoming commonplace for tax authorities as a tool for enforcement. Improvements in technology, technological adoption and in some cases machine learning, hold great promise for finding the taxpayers who are most likely to avoid taxes, thus improving the detection of non...
Working Paper
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– Evidence from Tanzania
While technical assistance and increased use of ICT in the area of tax administration have been regarded to hold considerable promise for greater revenue collection, the evidence on how these activities work in the real-world circumstances of developing countries is scant. The paper attempts to fill...
Displaying 32 of 38 results