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Publications (51)
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This paper presents an analysis of the recent evolution of social assistance in the developing world, looking at its complex typological configuration, which has interlinked with, and partly reflects the complex demographic and epidemiological transitions and rapid urbanization and economic...
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A key policy problem in most developing countries is the size of the informal sector and its persistence over time. In need to increase their tax revenues, policy makers face a trade-off between decreasing tax rates (making formalizing potentially more attractive) and alternatively raising tax rates...
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– Equality of opportunity versus welfarism
How does the public provision of education and the deployment of distortionary tax and subsidy instruments differ when the government’s objective is conventional welfarist compared to when the objective is the non-welfarist one of equality of opportunity? This paper develops a framework in which the...
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In this paper we explore the income data in two surveys that underpin a South African tax-benefit microsimulation model. The simulated taxes and benefits using each dataset are compared with each other and with administrative data for a common time point. We explore discrepancies between the...
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– How data availability may hide the evidence
This study aims at providing causal evidence for tax-motivated profit-shifting out of developing countries, which, while often claimed to be the most affected, have been largely neglected in the literature. It uses global firm-level panel data from 2006–2015 and identifies profit-shifting through...
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– The case of social benefits in Tanzania
A well functioning system of public service delivery requires the definition and measurement of eligibility for services to be determined in a transparent and non-discretionary manner. This paper uses the case of the Productive Social Safety Net in mainland Tanzania to explore factors that hinder...
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– The role of decentralization
We examine the evolution of educational assistance in Indonesia, following two decades of government decentralization, and its effect on education quality. Using Indonesia Family Life Survey data, we exploit as exogenous rule the variation in the implementation of government decentralization to...
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In 2006, the Bolivian government introduced a large-scale cash transfer programme, Bono Juancito Pinto (BJP). Exploiting the exogenous variation of the programme expansion, this paper examines the impact of BJP on schooling and child labour. The analysis suggests that the transfer increases the...
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Social assistance programmes proliferated and expanded across much of the global South from the mid-1990s. Within Africa there has been enormous variation in this trend: some governments expanded coverage dramatically while others resisted this. The existing literature on social assistance, or...
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– Evidence from Ghana’s District Assemblies Common Fund
This paper examines the influence of political considerations on intergovernmental fiscal transfers in Ghana. The two-step system GMM approach was used to estimate transfers and elections data for 167 districts from 1994 to 2014. The analysis was country-wide and covers swing districts as well as...
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– The impact of state ineffectiveness and political violence
The role of the state in promoting development is well established in the institutional economics literature. Yet, in recent decades the attention has been turned to the opposite side of the spectrum. Facing high levels of poverty and showing a slower progress in achieving development outcomes...
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– The case of Progresa-Oportunidades-Prospera programme
This study presents an analysis of the electoral impacts of one of the most prominent conditional cash transfers in the world: Mexico’s Progresa-Oportunidades-Prospera (POP) programme. Using population censuses, and POP’s administrative records and elections data, we exploit the targeting criteria...
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– Simulating universal pensions in Ecuador, Ghana, Tanzania, and South Africa
We use four novel, cross-country comparable tax-benefit microsimulation models for Ecuador, Ghana, Tanzania, and South Africa to evaluate ex ante the expansion of a universal old-age pension in a static setting. Universal pensions would significantly reduce poverty and inequality in settings in...
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Governments’ revenues are lower when multinational enterprises avoid paying corporate income tax by shifting their profits to tax havens. In this paper, we ask which countries’ tax revenues are affected most by this tax avoidance and how much. To estimate the scale of profit shifting, we start by...
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Can a society suffering contests between rich and poor achieve good governance in the face of endemic corruption? We examine a stylized poor state with weak institutions in which a ‘culture of evasion’ damages state authority. Many evade tax payments, limiting the state’s economic development...
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While it is recognized that effective state institutions are pivotal for economic development, it is not well understood what their origins are and what explains their cross-country differences. We focus on budget institutions in developing economies, as efficient public finance planning in such...
Displaying 16 of 51 results