In 2016, the South African government introduced a comprehensive reform to simplify and harmonize the pension system in order to incentivize pension savings and increase the fairness of the retirement system. Using administrative tax micro-data, we assess the impact of the 2016 reform and find...

Do aid projects affect citizens' motivation to pay taxes? We address this question by combining fine-grained data on aid projects from AidData and survey data from the Afrobarometer for 34 African countries. We first employ a subnational analysis, where the treatment varies by administrative...

Developing countries need to raise sufficient tax revenue to finance development. Revenue mobilization is often hampered by limited tax compliance, weak institutions, and technical problems with tax collection. One solution to these challenges is person-to-government (P2G) mobile phone payments,...

This paper, the first of two on global oil theft and fraud, discusses the prevalence, methods, and consequences of global oil theft, valued at US$133 billion per year and equivalent to 5-7 per cent of the global market for crude oil and petroleum fuels. However, the impact of oil theft is...

Despite major public finance reform efforts over the last decade, Myanmarese public finances continue to be characterized by relative weakness in revenue collection, budget execution, and long-term sustainability. Myanmar is therefore in need of comprehensive public finance reform. Two top...

We utilize the recently updated UNU-WIDER Government Revenue Dataset, which covers key indicators on tax and non-tax revenues for 196 countries since the 1980s, to study the dynamics of government revenue tax collection across selected periods from 1985 up to the most recent available year...

There exists a burgeoning empirical literature on the impact of aid fragmentation on development outcomes in aid-receiving countries, with it being widely recognized that aid fragmentation is deleterious. This paper adds to the existing literature by estimating the impact of aid fragmentation on...

Rising globalization has exerted a downward pressure on global tariffs, thereby eroding tariff revenues in developing nations. We analyse how gains from lowering import tariffs are distributed within the firm and the corresponding tax (base) implications. First, we study the effect of tariff...

This second of two papers on global oil theft discusses ways to reduce oil theft, misappropriation, and fraud. At US$133 billion per year, oil is the largest stolen natural resource globally, while fuel is the most smuggled natural resource. Oil theft equates to 5-7 per cent of the global market...

Employment in Vietnam and elsewhere in Asia has grown more slowly than GDP over the last several decades. This means GDP per capita is rising. Vietnamese policymakers, however, are concerned that ongoing structural transformation is creating too few jobs. We use data for seven aggregated sectors...