The objective of this report is to provide a comprehensive evaluation of the tax gap in Ghana, and help the Government of Ghana identify the areas where they can increase tax revenue by improving compliance. Tax gap for corporate income tax, import tax, estimated value added tax, and potential...

Ghana's tax collection is low compared with other lower middle-income countries. Non-compliance of tax payments is an urgent issue in Ghana, as the government has been suffering from a widening fiscal deficit and a rising debt burden. Learning from experiences in other countries, this report...

Many production firms use intermediary trading firms to export indirectly. This paper uses Chinese export data at the transaction level to investigate the tax evasion motive through indirect trade. The paper provides strong evidence that, under China's partial export value-added tax rebate...

This paper reviews the Republic of Korea's experience with electronic tax invoices for its value-added tax regime from the perspectives of tax policy makers and administrators. The paper evaluates Korea's implementation of electronic tax invoicing and analyzes its effect on tax compliance...

This paper examines how providing better information to customs inspectors and monitoring their actions affects tax revenue and fraud detection in Madagascar. First, an instrumental variables strategy is used to show that transaction-specific, third-party valuation advice on a subset of...

This paper examines the impact of the quality of the business environment as well as the monitoring capacity of the tax agency on firms' tax evasion and production decisions. First, the paper uses firm-level data for 30 African and Latin American countries to show that tax evasion and...

How should developing countries tax corporate income? This paper studies this question in Costa Rica, where firms face discontinuously higher average tax rates on profits when their revenue marginally increases. The paper combines a discontinuity and a bunching design to estimate the profit...

Although low tax morale hits developing countries hardest, little is known about its determinants in those countries. This paper examines the impact of trust in public institutions and the neighborhood on individual tax morale in four African countries: Algeria, Ghana, Morocco, and Nigeria....

Cash transactions for goods and services in which no receipts are issued greatly increase the risk of tax evasion. Despite the availability of banking services and alternative payment, key sectors of the economy remain largely cash-based in almost all developing countries. This paper shows the...

What major insights have emerged from development economics in the past decade, and how do they matter for the World Bank? This challenging question was recently posed by World Bank Group President David Malpass to the staff of the Development Research Group. This paper assembles a set of 13...