Suchergebnisse

There are substantial differences in the spread of the covid-19 pandemic and policy responses to it between high- and low-income countries. While evidence on the former is growing, there remain more unanswered questions on the latter. This paper addresses this gap by providing insights on the impact of the pandemic in Rwanda, based on firm-level administrative data from Value Added Tax (VAT) returns. We find that VAT sales in 2020 declined by 11.4 % compared to 2019. These losses are particularly associated with a lockdown imposed around April 2020, after which sales quickly rebounded to pre-crisis levels once restrictions were lifted. In absolute terms, the economic cost is concentrated among the largest firms. However, small firms have been most affected in proportional terms. Disaggregating our results further, we show that firms in accommodation and food, transport services, wholesale and retail trade, as well as those registered in the capital, have been particularly affected by the crisis. Overall, the decline in sales translated to a similarly large percentage loss in VAT revenue for the government.

This report was commissioned in response to issues identified in the Domestic Revenue Mobilisation Strategy (DRMS) in order to identify the changes to the policy-making process that could add value, such as quality of the technical analysis and inclusiveness of the process itself - transparency, gender impact awareness and integration with government economic policy. Uganda's tax system is broadly conventional from a structural perspective. There are significant taxes on goods sourced through international trade and revenues have shown considerable growth in nominal terms over recent years but it is clear that they remain well below expectations. Uganda is currently a low-income country, faced with the familiar dilemma of needing to raise the level of tax as a share of GDP significantly in order to fund government projects and programmes, while simultaneously wanting to provide an economic environment that encourages both domestic and inward investment. It also faces significant economic and social challenges such as the acute shortage of formal employment opportunities for young people, the need for higher levels of skills in the country's workforce, and the pressure to modernise and commercialise the agricultural sector. Tax has a bearing on these issues. In this environment, tax policy needs to be creative and interventionist.

The South African services sector is large and growing. This coupled with declining employment shares in manufacturing and mining (i.e. deindustrialization) suggests that South Africa is a de facto service-orientated economy. Employment patterns in services reveal a segmentation that is characterized by high-productivity, high-wage services, low-productivity, low-wage services, and government services. There has been sustained growth in services exports in the post-1994 period but the composition is biased toward traditional services. Increased entry into developing country markets is characterized by increasingly sophisticated services. A key driver of export growth is the expansion of foreign direct investment into developed country markets, and increasingly, into developing country markets, particularly African markets.