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Publications (26)
Journal Article
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
When seeking to increase their tax revenues, policy-makers face a likely tradeoff between decreasing personal income tax rates (making formalizing more attractive and potentially contributing to revenue) and alternatively raising tax rates (potentially slowing down the formalization of the economy...
Journal Article
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
This article is the first to provide estimates of how minimum wages affect worker flows and employment growth rates in an employment scarce developing country context. We investigate the effects of a large, exogenous increase in agricultural minimum wages in South Africa. We find that changes...
Journal Article
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 fnancial accounts, we fnd that proft shifting is...
Journal Article
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
– Equality of opportunity versus welfarism
A common claim in the policy discourse is that a government wishing to achieve equality of opportunity should use public provision of education for equalisation of opportunities rather than income taxation, which only equalizes incomes. We develop a framework in which the tax and education provision...
Journal Article
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
– Poverty dynamics and inequality in South Africa between 2008 and 2017
Longitudinal surveys allow us to understand how markers of (dis)advantage determine present material welfare and economic upward or downward mobility over time. In this paper, we use five waves of panel data to empirically assess the extent and dynamics of poverty in South Africa between 2008 and...
Journal Article
– Evidence from China
We investigate heterogeneous and nonlinear intergenerational transmission of education and the impact on this of house prices. Using the China Household Finance Survey, we construct household history of property pur-chases and educational investment over the past 16 years with current filial...
Journal Article
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
This study explores the impact of the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in South Africa on income poverty and inequality in South Africa. Using a static tax-benefit microsimulation model with input datasets that were adjusted to reflect people’s earned incomes just before the pandemic (March 2020)...
Journal Article
– Rapidly increasing top incomes amid low national growth in South Africa
Despite South Africa’s need for inclusive economic growth, we find that the top income percentiles continue to diverge from the rest of the income distribution. We compare household survey data and tax data (which, unlike household survey data, includes accurate data for the very rich) to...
Journal Article
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
– Method and Evidence from Micro-Data
This study uses a global dataset with information about 210,000 corporations in 142 countries to investigate whether tax avoidance by multinational firms is more prevalent in less-developed countries. The paper proposes a novel approach to studying cross-border profit shifting, which has relatively...
Journal Article
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
– Direct evidence using transaction data
This paper provides the first direct systematic evidence of profit shifting through transfer mispricing in a developing country. Using South African transaction-level customs data, the author directly tests for transfer price deviations from arm's-length pricing. It is found that multinational firms...
Journal Article
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
Part of Journal Special Issue
Welfare and distributive effects of social assistance in the Global South
Journal Article
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
– The Role of Decentralization
Part of Journal Special Issue
Welfare and distributive effects of social assistance in the Global South
Journal Article
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
Part of Journal Special Issue
Welfare and distributive effects of social assistance in the Global South
Journal Article
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
Part of Journal Special Issue
Welfare and distributive effects of social assistance in the Global South
Journal Article
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
Governments do not have perfect information regarding constituent priorities and needs. This lack of knowledge opens the door for groups to lobby in order to affect the taxes they pay the government. We examine the political economy of a decentralised revenue-raising authority in light of social...
Journal Article
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
– Evidence from South African tax registers
Part of Journal Special Issue
Public economics and development action
Displaying 16 of 26 results