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Taxation/Redistribution

Chapter 4: Case studies on Bangladesh and Mozambique

The Institutional Diagnostic Project case study on Bangladesh and Mozambique is an attempt to explain the paradox of sustainability of the former and the disappointed hopes of the growth of the latter.

Institutional Diagnostic Synthesis (RA2)- Presentation

Outline of the presentation Objective, methodology and development of the project The synthesis volume and concluding chapters a) Identifying obstacles to development: economic perspective b) Identifying institutional obstacles: the role of politics c) Identifying institutional obstacles: state capacity and property…

Appraising institutional challenges in the early stages of development- Chapter 10: Conclusion

Two central lessons can be drawn from the foregoing analysis. First, many institutional failures are traceable to the way politics functions. Therefore, any diagnosis or understanding of the impediments to a country’s long-term development that overlooks the country’s political economy…

Chapter 9: Identifying institutional obstacles to structural transformation: state capacity and property rights

After having examined the role of politics (in last chapter) in spurring or slowing down structural transformation and development, we are now ready to probe the issue of state capacity. This will complete our discussion of the role of governance-related…

Chapter 8: Identifying institutional obstacles to structural transformation: the role of politics

In this chapter, the focus is on issues that involve politics. More specifically, we look at the role of political leadership and state autonomy in development. The institutions involved determine the quality of governance in a country, but they are…

Chapter 6: Taiwan’s development miracle

There are several reasons why development scholars should be interested in the case of Taiwan. As one author has written: ‘It once had a single dominant party following the Leninist model; it now has a competitive multiparty system. It was…

Chapter 5: South Korea in the early days of its takeoff

‘What would have been the conclusion of an institutional diagnostic of the development potential of South Korea conducted in the mid- or late-1970s, at a time when the country was still a low-income country, at roughly the same income level…

Chapter 3: Case studies on Benin and Tanzania

There are several reasons why Benin is an interesting country to study, and some of them have no doubt contributed to making it an aid darling for many donors. First, although it is made up of an extraordinarily varied mosaic…

Appraising institutional challenges in the early stages of development: Introduction to part 2

At the core of the institutional diagnostic project is the idea that we can gain more knowledge about the role of institutions by undertaking in-depth country case studies than by carrying out broad quantitative exercises based on a large sample…

Chapter 2: Methodological framework for an institutional diagnostic

The preceding chapter defined the objective of the institutional diagnostics of each particular country and made explicit the concepts and analytical principles that need to be mobilised in order to conduct such an exercise. By providing a short description of…

Chapter 1: Institutions and institutional change: concepts and theories

The ‘institutions matter’ slogan appears today as a fundamental truth about development. Widely shared by the development community, including international organisations, it goes with the idea that the benefits of both market operations and state interventions are significantly conditioned by…

Appraising institutional challenges in the early stages of development

If there is absolutely no doubt that institutions matter for development, and for development policies and strategies in the first place, the crucial issue is knowing how they matter. After all, impressive economic development achievements have been observed despite the…

How to target enforcement at scale? Evidence from tax audits in senegal

Developing economies are characterized by limited compliance with government regulation, such as taxation. Resources for enforcement are scarce, but the increasing availability of digitized data and data processing technologies have the potential to improve the targeting of enforcement. Levering an…

Measuring the potential for property taxation in Dakar, Senegal

Abstract: Property taxes are in theory easy to enforce in their simplest form due to their tangible tax base, and are considered an equitable means to raise revenue in low-income countries. In spite of these features, African countries, where cities…

Thematic Insight: Modernizing tax collection

Developing, maintaining, and using tax records to boost revenue. Tax revenue funds the provision of public goods, but poor countries struggle to raise taxes. In fact, as shown in the figure above, low income countries (LICs) raise only half as much tax…

Bangladesh Institutional Diagnostic – Chapter 7

Bangladesh Institutional Diagnostic Chapter 7: Institutional dimensions of tax reforms in Bangladesh Chapter Overview List of tables and figures Development context The public resource mobilisation challenge Main objectives, methodology, and approach of the chapter Tax mobilisation issues in developing countries:…

Red Tape? The Revenue Impact of the VAT Filing Thresholds

Value-added tax systems across the world are afflicted with size-dependent regulations.The benefit of such regulations to the tax authority is unclear. In this paper, we use an administrative dataset from the state of Delhi in India to first show that…

Benin – Regulation of a Dominant Sector: A Case Study of Cotton

This publication is part of the Benin Institutional Diagnostic. Contents: 1 Introduction 2 Analytical framework 2.1 Organisation of the cotton sector 2.2 External factors 2.3 Domestic factors 3 Historical background of cotton in Benin: 1641-1960 3.1 Pre-colonial period to 1949:…

Event: “Sharing Solutions” – Catching fraudulent firms in India

Shekhar Mittal, of the University of California at Berkeley, presents his research on the Value Added Tax (VAT) system in India. A key development concern is how to improve tax collections, which are central to building state capacity. Mittal examines…

Event: “Sharing solutions” – Tax audits under weak fiscal capacity

Pierre Bachas from the World Bank presents on his EDI-funded research in Senegal on how to audit populations when there is limited government capacity. This presentation was part of a larger convening workshop for EDI, “Sharing Solutions, Sharing Strategies: A…

Relaxing credit and tenure security constraints

“Relaxing credit and tenure security constraints: Credit and land titling in Uganda” A presentation by Michael O’Sullivan (with contributions from Maitreesh Ghatak, Markus Goldstein, James Habyarimana, Joao Montalvao, Christopher Udry) This presentation was part of the convening event hosted by…

Bringing property owners into the tax net

A presentation by Justine Knebelmann, Paris School of Economics This presentation was part of the convening event hosted by CEGA at the University of California, Berkeley, in August 2018. Read a summary of the event.

Tax audits under weak fiscal capacity

A presentation by Pierre Bachas (World Bank Research) This presentation was part of the convening event hosted by CEGA at the University of California, Berkeley, in August 2018. Read a summary of the event.

Institutions, Development and Growth

Where does the evidence stand on institutions, development and growth? This paper explores the empirical evidence on institutions and growth. The empirical evidence on institutions ranges from historical studies to econometric analyses, with different studies making very different theoretical commitments…

Clientelistic politics and economic development – an overview

This paper provides an overview of the literature on political clientelism  and its relation to economic development. It starts by describing the range of mechanisms used by political operatives to monitor how specific voters vote in order to target clientelistic…

The Dynamics of Family Systems: Lessons from Past and Present Times

This paper reviews the economic literature on how family systems respond to changes in resource endowments, outside economic opportunities, the development of markets, and surrounding institutions. On topics where economic contributions are scarce, we also provide insights from other disciplines,…

Institutions, Firm Financing and Growth

This paper reviews and synthesizes current knowledge on the role of institutions on firm financing and growth in developing countries. First, the paper presents stylized facts on the different institutional constraints under which firms in developing countries operate. Next, the…

Institutions and Economic Inequality

I ask what clues do historical and contemporary data provide for theory building and empirical work to enhance our understanding of the relationship between institutions and inequality. The survey begins with a brief overview of the role of institutions in…

At the Intersection: A Review of Institutions in Economic Development

We present accepted basic arguments on the role of institutions in development and then discuss the corresponding empirical evidence in support (or not) of those arguments. Methodologically, our emphasis is on experimental evidence wherever available, and thematically we focus on…

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