Using a large-scale novel panel dataset (2005-14) on schools from the Indian state of Assam, we test for the impact of violent conflict on female students' enrollment rates. We find that a doubling of average killings in a district-year leads to a 13 per cent drop in girls' enrollment rate with...

COVID-19 causes extremely high mortality among the old. This motivates a comparison of the losses of future lifetime years and future lifetime years of work ensuing from a hypothetical 25,000 excess deaths in Italy, whose affluent population is one of the world's oldest, with those in Kenya,...

Changes in global food prices have affected EU producers and consumers and have triggered policy reactions through the EU's political process. In particular, the EU and member states responded by social policies to protect their consumers, attempts to regulate 'speculation' on agricultural...

This paper shows how an elite cadre of public sector officials played a key role in the success of administrative reforms in Brazil's state tax administration bureaus in the 1990s. The success of the reforms strengthened public sector bureaucracies and institutions at all government levels,...

This paper evaluates the impacts of combining household surveys with income tax return files, in terms of growth, inequality, and social welfare in Brazil from 2007 to 2015. This exercise holds the promise of adding more realistic top income values to traditional surveys. While the previous...

The taxation of the mining industry varies considerably from nation to nation. This paper reflects on the evolving use of various taxation approaches applied by governments to the mining sector. It includes a description of the principal tax types and investment tax incentives and briefly...

One key element in the reduction of poverty and (in Latin America) inequality has been the achievement of greater fiscal equity; we analyse one key part of this process, which is the earmarking of portions of tax revenue to be spent on progressive public expenditures such as social protection,...

The global framework for financing development, adopted in 2015, places great emphasis on mobilizing domestic resources to finance the Sustainable Development Goals, which include universal healthcare. In a recent paper Reeves et al. (2015) attribute progress towards universal healthcare to...

Liberalizing trade has proven highly challenging for some low-income countries, as a large share of their tax extraction derives from trade taxation. After significant drops in tariff levels over the last 30 years, the recovery of lost revenues by other sources of taxation has been highly uneven...

Motivated by the fact that the taxation of natural resources is both crucial and particularly challenging for developing countries, this paper draws on a unique dataset to produce empirical evidence on two issues pertaining to the fiscal impact of oil. On a sample of 31 countries during the...