In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, several countries enacted tax and social protection measures to help mitigate the economic hardship faced by individuals and households. This experience underscores the need to better understand the impact of such programmes on incomes and poverty during...

Aid is said to be fungible at the aggregate level if it raises government expenditures by less than the total amount. This happens when the recipient government decreases domestic revenue, decreases net borrowing, or when aid bypasses the budget. This study makes three contributions to both...

This paper sets out to provide an introduction to two sets of questions, and to some relevant literature that has tried to answer them. The first set of questions concern what determines growth in low-income countries, and how the answers are conditioned by the history of fiscal policy design...

A dynamic relationship between foreign aid and domestic fiscal variables in Uganda is analysed using a cointegrated vector autoregressive model over the period 1972-2008. Results show that aid is a significant element of long-run fiscal equilibrium, is associated with increased tax effort and...

The mixed record on the 2015 Millennium Development Goal (MDG) targets and the focus on global public goods in post-MDG debates questions the future of traditional development co-operation (official development assistance, ODA). Meanwhile, international financial crisis and fiscal retrenchment...

This paper contributes to the debate on aid effectiveness by looking at the 'how' of aid effectiveness. In other words it provides an assessment of whether aid only filled a financing gap or whether it, in addition, helped influence the political economy in a way that engendered growth. Ghana...

Forty billion dollars of official development assistance during 1991-2012 reduced Ethiopian absolute poverty while underwriting more efficient but exclusionary public institutions. This aid-institutions paradox reflects a strong interest-alignment between major donors pursuing geostrategic...

The reduction of poverty, and more recently inequality, are pressing concerns in many low- and middle-income countries, not in the least as a result of the Sustainable Development Goals committing countries to significant improvements by 2030. Redistribution is important for reaching these...

Using the universe of South African corporate tax returns for 2009-14, we estimate profit- and debt-shifting responses in South Africa. We find evidence that South African subsidiaries engage in profit shifting and that profit-shifting responses to tax incentives across all channels are...

Recent work on the relationship between tax structure and economic growth has offered little reliable evidence for developing countries. Yet it is in such countries where the greatest changes in tax structure not only have been seen over the past 30 years but will likely continue to be seen in...