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Publications (184)
Blog
Uganda, with a fiscal deficit of 5.6% in 2023, has increasingly turned to local resources to make up for its revenue shortfall since the World Bank suspended its funding on 8 August 2023 over the country’s anti-homosexuality law. In early April 2024, traders in downtown Kampala protested against...
Working Paper
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– Re-thinking the use of unit values or community prices
Analysis of household food consumption patterns and welfare requires knowledge of household demand responses to changes in price and income. Estimation of the price and expenditure elasticities requires detailed data on household purchases and prices, which are often not available in many developing...
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– Evidence and policy discussion
Offshore tax havens cause large losses of government revenue by facilitating tax evasion by wealthy individuals. This paper focuses on offshore tax evasion in developing countries and documents two empirical regularities. First, there is no clear development gradient in the exposure to offshore tax...
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...
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– Evidence from Rwanda
In this study, we explore the impact of a smart classroom (SCM) programme on student performance in science subjects in a high-stakes national exam for middle-high school students in Rwanda. To do this, we leverage plausibly exogenous variations in programme exposure induced by the staggered...
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...
Donors increasingly speak of locally led aid response, but often do not walk the walk. Case in point is the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the humanitarian and development agency of the largest donor country in the world. In late 2021, USAID set a target that 25% of its...
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Time-use statistics are sensitive to measurement error, especially errors that might be introduced based on whether the informant is reporting on herself or reporting on others in the household. In this paper, we use the nationally representative time-use survey in India and propensity score...
Blog
Amadou Boly is Special Assistant in the Economic Governance and Knowledge Management Complex at the African Development Bank (ADB). Before that, he was a research fellow and a coordinator of the visitor programme at UNU-WIDER. In this blog, he reflects on his journey since leaving UNU-WIDER and...
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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...
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– Evidence from Viet Nam
New developments of existing technologies over time have led to emergent patterns of technology adoption and, accordingly, changing impacts on economy and society. Focusing on the arrival of mobile internet in the early 2010s in developing countries, this paper identifies significant positive...
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We investigate if financial inclusion leads to improved nutrition in rural Rwanda, using Rwandan Integrated Household Living Conditions surveys (2013/14 and 2016/17). Our empirical evidence shows a robust positive impact of financial inclusion efforts undertaken by formal financial institutions...
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...
Journal Article
– Evidence from financial liberalization
THIS ARTICLE IS ON EARLY VIEW This study examines the redistributive effects of financial liberalization, including domestic and external finance reforms, implemented in 64 emerging and low-income countries over the past four decades. To identify these effects, we employ a 'doubly robust' estimation...
– 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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
The 1980s are sometimes referred to as the ‘lost decade’ for development. Many countries in the Global South experienced weak or no improvement in poverty indicators. Our projections are equally dire for the current decade and prospects for the SDGs unless action is taken. We project a decade of...
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– New projections of the UN Sustainable Development Goals
In this paper, we present new projections for a range of global poverty-related Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), specifically, extreme monetary poverty, undernutrition, stunting, child mortality, maternal mortality, and access to clean water and basic sanitation.Our projections, based on...
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The ethnic diversity–financial inclusion nexus remains one of the least explored topics in the literature despite global attempts to promote cultural mixing due to its socioeconomic benefits. We contribute to the literature by examining the link between ethnic diversity and financial inclusion using...
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...
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Cameroon is an example of a developing country where the transition from agriculture to services has defied standard patterns seen in developed countries. While prior research has explored this shift’s impact on economic growth, its effects on women’s representation in the labour market have been...
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– Linking funding allocation patterns and localization in Sierra Leone
Development assistance funding by international donors is rarely channelled to/through local actors. While there are strong normative and practical arguments for localizing funding, progress has been piecemeal as donors are largely left to their own devices to decide how, when, where, and how much...
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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...
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– Evidence from developing countries
The global economy, dominated by the consequences of a disastrous health crisis and international tensions, needs policy support to regain its growth dynamic. To regain an inclusive and sustainable growth dynamic, structural policies of governments are needed to allow a reallocation of resources and...
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– Evidence from Viet Nam
We examine the impact of temperature shocks and climate change on household financial behaviour in Viet Nam. To do so, we first estimate the effect of temperature on household borrowing and savings using Vietnamese longitudinal data that matches satellite reanalysis temperature data with household...
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– Evidence from India
This paper analyses the role of tertiary education on rural development. Using census data on villages in India for 2011, we find that skilled workers have had an important impact on rural prosperity. A 1 percentage point rise in the share of the village population with tertiary education raises per...
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The current context of the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the most vulnerable socio-economic groups to greater financial risk and thus could lead to exacerbating income inequality. The crisis creates an opportunity to demand further structural and systemic reforms for redistributive justice.Our paper...
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The study aims at bridging gaps in both theoretical and empirical literature pertaining to multigenerational persistence. From a theoretical standpoint, it argues that parental altruism is influenced by social heterogeneity rather than income-based heterogeneity. One’s position in the social...
Displaying 32 of 184 results