Suchergebnisse

This article provides evidence from a fragile state that citizens demand more of a voice in the government when it tries to tax them. I examine a field experiment randomizing property tax collection across 356 neighborhoods of a large Congolese city. The tax campaign was the first time most citizens had been registered by the state or asked to pay formal taxes. It raised property tax compliance from 0.1% in control to 11.6% in treatment. It also increased political participation by about 5 percentage points (31%): citizens in taxed neighborhoods were more likely to attend town hall meetings hosted by the government or submit evaluations of its performance. To participate in these ways, the average citizen incurred costs equal to their daily household income, and treated citizens spent 43% more than control. Treated citizens also positively updated about the provincial government, perceiving more revenue, less leakage, and a greater responsibility to provide public goods. The results suggest that broadening the tax base has a "participation dividend," a key idea in historical accounts of the emergence of inclusive governance in early modern Europe and a common justification for donor support of tax programs in weak states.

This paper provides evidence from a fragile state that citizens demand more of a voice in the government when it tries to tax them. I examine a field experiment randomizing property tax collection across 356 neighborhoods of a large Congolese city. The tax campaign was the first time most citizens had been registered by the state or asked to pay formal taxes. It raised property tax compliance from 0.1%in control to 11.5% in treatment. It also increased political participation by about 5 percentage points (31%): citizens in taxed neighborhoods were more likely to attend townhall meetings hosted by the government or to submit evaluations of its performance. To participate in these ways, the average citizen incurred costs equal to their daily household income, and treated citizens spent 43% more than control. Treated citizens also positively updated about the provincial government, perceiving more revenue, less leakage, and a greater responsibility to provide public goods. The results suggest that broadening the tax base has a 'participation dividend,' a key idea in historical accounts of the emergence of inclusive governance in early modern Europe and a common justification for donor support of tax programs in weak states.

"Here are highlights from Paul Farmers' speeches to a variety of audiences, from Princeton to Harvard to Notre Dame to Berkeley. Paul is a rock star of the academy who has a large following among many groups: students, doctors, general readers, activists, public health folks, professors. He is the pied piper of everyone who wants to change the world. Not only is he cofounder of Partners In Health,US Deputy Special Envoy to Haiti,head of social medicine at Harvard, but he's also a charming, humorous, engaging public speaker whose charisma is legend. In this book, conceived of as a graduation gift for students write large, Farmer addresses the challenges facing young people with a call for them to change the world and become activists"--

"Here are highlights from Paul Farmers' speeches to a variety of audiences, from Princeton to Harvard to Notre Dame to Berkeley. Paul is a rock star of the academy who has a large following among many groups: students, doctors, general readers, activists, public health folks, professors. He is the pied piper of everyone who wants to change the world. Not only is he cofounder of Partners In Health, US Deputy Special Envoy to Haiti, head of social medicine at Harvard, but he's also a charming, humorous, engaging public speaker whose charisma is legend. In this book, conceived of as a graduation gift for students write large, Farmer addresses the challenges facing young people with a call for them to change the world and become activists"--

AbstractHow might fragile states escape a low‐capacity trap in which citizens pay little tax and the government has insufficient revenue to increase enforcement or provide public goods? We argue that governments can escape such traps by regularizing tax collection. When citizens observe taxes being collected in a systematic, non‐arbitrary manner, they are likely to update positively about the procedural performance of the government, increasing their intrinsic motivation to comply. We test this idea in the first door‐to‐door property tax collection campaign in Kananga, Democratic Republic of the Congo, which raised compliance from near zero to 10.3%. Linking pre‐campaign surveys with administrative tax data, we document a strong relationship between citizens' prior perceptions of government performance and property tax payment. Then, exploiting the campaign's random roll‐out, we find that systematic tax collection caused citizens to update positively about the government's procedural performance. Together, these results are consistent with a virtuous cycle of perceived government performance and fiscal capacity.

We use a variant of the Implicit Association Test (IAT) to examine individuals' implicit attitudes towards various ethnic groups. Using a population from the Democratic Republic of Congo, we find that the IAT measures show evidence of an implicit bias in favor of one's own ethnicity. Individuals have implicit views of their own ethnic group that are more positive than their implicit views of other ethnic groups. We find this implicit bias to be quantitatively smaller than the (explicit) bias one finds when using self-reported attitudes about different ethnic groups.

This paper investigates the trade-offs between local elites and state agents as tax collectors in low-capacity states. We study a randomized policy experiment assigning neighborhoods of a large Congolese city to property tax collection by city chiefs or state agents. Chief collection raised tax compliance by 3.2 percentage points, increasing revenue by 44 percent. Chiefs collected more bribes but did not undermine tax morale or trust in government. Results from a hybrid treatment arm in which state agents consulted with chiefs before collection suggest that chief collectors achieved higher compliance by using local information to more efficiently target households with high payment propensities, rather than by being more effective at persuading households to pay conditional on having visited them. (JEL D73, D83, H24, H26, H71, O12, O17)