Many developing countries have struggled with realizing sufficient revenues from property tax. However, as developing countries experience economic growth, they are also seeing property values rising, providing a bigger tax base from which to realize revenues. Technology has made tax...

This Property Tax Diagnostic Manual provides guidance on how to analyze and assess immovable property tax systems, diagnose the strengths and weaknesses of such systems, and develop a property tax intervention strategy where needed. Its higher objective is to support increasingly fair and stable...

The technical complexity of ensuring that tax rolls are complete and valuations current is often perceived as a major barrier to bringing in more property tax revenues in developing countries. This paper shows how high-resolution satellite imagery makes it possible to assess the completeness of...

Rapid urbanization in India means cities face a tremendous challenge to finance and deliver theincreasing demand for basic municipal services. When compared to peers in the Organisation forEconomic Co-operation and Development (OECD), India performs poorly in generating revenues fromthe urban...

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...

In a context of fiscal consolidation and the need to deliver on a structural reform agenda, policy makers in Albania must not lose sight of the critical redistributive role of the fiscal system, particularly its impact on poverty and inequality. Using household survey data, this paper estimates...

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...

This study discusses options how to increase the Dominican Republic tax revenue and attempts to identify priority areas for efficiency-enhancing reforms. A 2016 World Bank report on Dominican fiscal policy found that the country's tax expenditures were poorly targeted and regressively...

A recent survey of rigorous impact evaluations of programs to help small and medium-size firms to formalize indicates that the programs do not seem to work for most informal firms. One of the few exceptions finds large effects of a tax simplification program in Brazil called SIMPLES on firms'...