Suchergebnisse

Effective local government taxation is critical to achieving the governance benefits widely attributed to decentralization, but in practice successful tax reform has been rare because of entrenched political resistance. This article offers new insights into the political dynamics of property tax reform through a case study of Sierra Leone, focusing on variation in experiences and outcomes across the country's four largest city councils. Based on this evidence, the article argues that elite resistance has posed a particularly acute barrier to local government tax reform, but that ethnic diversity has sometimes served to strengthen reform by fragmenting elite resistance. Furthermore, opposition councils have had stronger incentives to strengthen tax collection than councils dominated by the ruling party, in order to increase their fiscal autonomy. More generally, heightened electoral competition can lead to sustained revenue gains by encouraging city councils to adopt a more contractual approach to tax reform that stresses transparency, engagement, and equity. ; http://afraf.oxfordjournals.org ; hb2015

Effective local government taxation is critical to achieving the governance benefits widely attributed to decentralization, but in practice successful tax reform has been rare because of entrenched political resistance. This article offers new insights into the political dynamics of property tax reform through a case study of Sierra Leone, focusing on variation in experiences and outcomes across the country's four largest city councils. Based on this evidence, the article argues that elite resistance has posed a particularly acute barrier to local government tax reform, but that ethnic diversity has sometimes served to strengthen reform by fragmenting elite resistance. Furthermore, opposition councils have had stronger incentives to strengthen tax collection than councils dominated by the ruling party, in order to increase their fiscal autonomy. More generally, heightened electoral competition can lead to sustained revenue gains by encouraging city councils to adopt a more contractual approach to tax reform that stresses transparency, engagement, and equity.

Résumé Les universitaires et les bailleurs de fonds soutiennent de plus en plus que les pays d'Afrique peuvent améliorer leur capacité administrative générale en améliorant le recouvrement des recettes fiscales. Les partisans de cette théorie soutiennent que les améliorations éprouvantes sur le plan administratif au sein de l'administration fiscale peuvent avoir des retombées dans d'autres domaines de l'administration publique en instaurant des pratiques améliorées, nécessitant des améliorations dans d'autres secteurs, et en apportant des informations utiles à d'autres activités de l'État. Nous sommes les premiers à vérifier cette hypothèse sur le plan empirique au moyen d'un ensemble de données transnationales amélioré pour l'Afrique subsaharienne. Certaines données indiquent qu'entre 1973 et la fin des années 90, les améliorations dans l'administration fiscale précédaient généralement des améliorations administratives plus larges, conformément à notre hypothèse de recherche. En revanche, rien ne semble indiquer qu'une telle tendance ait existé au cours de la dernière décennie. Notre conclusion est que ces résultats confirment dans une certaine mesure l'hypothèse selon laquelle les améliorations dans le recouvrement de l'impôt peuvent susciter des améliorations plus larges dans la capacité de l'État, mais que ces corrélations ne sont pas garanties et dépendent du caractère particulier de la réforme. Résumé à l'intention des praticiens Les personnes associées aux initiatives de réforme de l'administration publique se sont pendant longtemps posé la question de savoir si la réforme était, ou devait être, un processus s'étendant essentiellement à l'échelle du système ou s'il devait être axé sur le développement de « poches d'efficacité ». Ce débat est particulièrement pertinent en matière de réforme fiscale : de plus en plus d'auteurs soutiennent que la réforme fiscale peut favoriser le changement à l'échelle du système, mais le modèle de réforme prédominant se concentre sur la création d'administrations fiscales autonomes afin d'obtenir des gains de capacité rapides mais ciblés. La présente étude vérifie l'hypothèse selon laquelle la réforme fiscale peut favoriser une réforme plus large, et donc le bien-fondé de l'adoption d'un modèle de réforme plus explicitement axé sur le changement à l'échelle du système.

Academics and donors have increasingly argued that African states can enhance their general administrative capacity by improving tax revenue collection. Proponents argue that administratively demanding improvements in tax administration may spillover to other areas of public administration by introducing improved practices, necessitating improvements elsewhere and providing data for other government activities. We make the first effort to test this hypothesis empirically, using an improved cross-country data set for sub-Saharan Africa. We find some evidence that from 1973 until the late 1990s improvements in tax administration tended to precede broader administrative improvements, consistent with the research hypothesis. By contrast, we find no evidence of such a pattern over the past decade. We conclude that these results provide tentative support for the hypothesis that improvements in tax collection can be a catalyst for broader gains in state capacity, but that such linkages are not guaranteed and depend on the particular character of reform.Points for practitionersThose involved with public administrative reform efforts have long been confronted with the question of whether reform is, or should be, an essentially system-wide process, or focused on developing 'pockets of effectiveness'. This debate is particularly relevant to tax reform: a growing academic literature has argued that tax reform can be a catalyst for system-wide change, but the dominant reform model has focused on the creation of autonomous revenue agencies to achieve rapid but focused capacity gains. This research examines the case for believing that tax reform can be a catalyst for broader reform, and thus the case for adopting a reform model that focuses more explicitly on system-wide change.

A large body of econometric research has generated growing support for the existence of a political resource curse, but has nonetheless continued to be regularly punctuated by research contesting those conclusions. This continuing disagreement can be explained in significant part by problems associated with low-quality government revenue data: it has undermined the robustness of many existing findings, while leading other researchers to rely on alternative measures of resource income as their primary explanatory variable – a highly imperfect measures of the underlying relationship of interest. We re-examine the relationship between taxation, non-tax revenue and democracy by employing dramatically improved data developed specifically for this research. We find the strongest evidence to date of a political resource curse, and provide evidence about the specific details of the underlying relationship: (i) natural resource wealth is anti-democratic, rather than merely stabilizing; (ii) it is driven primarily by changes in the composition of government revenue; (iii) it is best understood as a long-term relationship, rather than short-term changes in resource wealth being quickly translated into major political changes; and (iv) it is driven primarily by oil wealth, rather than mineral wealth, because governments are comparatively effective at translating oil wealth into the government revenues that drive the political resource curse.