This paper reviews the theoretical and practical issues surrounding the decentralization of responsibility for the provision of infrastructure to local governments in low income countries. The focus is on structural rather than management issues. There is plenty of evidence that following the...

This paper is about revenue mobilization and tax structure changes in developing countries since the 1970s, the factors underlying this pattern, and what this history suggests for the future. Several distinguished students of taxation have studied this set of questions for different periods of...

India will face great problems in finding a way to finance public services in its large cities in the next two decades. Backlogs in service levels and infrastructure are already great, and migration to urban areas will put even more pressure on state and local government budgets. Metropolitan...

This paper reviews the practice of levying an excise tax on soft drinks in sub-saharan African countries, and evaluates this practice against theoretical norms for levying an excise tax. The question is whether such taxes are justified or whether they are discriminatory and impose a welfare cost...

This paper is about the case for assigning taxing powers to subnational governments, and about the structure of this revenue assignment. As Musgrave (1983) put it in perhaps the seminal paper on this subject, “Who Should Tax, Where and What”? This review reconsiders the Musgrave questions...

In this paper, we analyze the case of developing a country that has been involved in a long-term comprehensive tax reform. One might argue that Jamaica is a good case study of the fiscal realities of moving from a conventional tax system to a flat tax system. However, through the reforms of the...

The goal in this paper is to build on the existing literature to better explain the tax assignment choices made by countries in different economic circumstances. In particular, we explain why tax assignment to subnational governments is five times greater in industrial than developing countries,...

The property tax is almost everyone’s choice for the principal local government tax revenue source in developing countries. The focus of public policy on this tax, and the interest it has drawn from public finance scholars and practitioners are evidence of its importance. Moreover, both...

In this paper, we report the current state of provincial revenue raising and analyze the potential for increased revenue mobilization. In the sections below, we document the current situation regarding local revenue capacity and mobilization in Pakistan using case studies of Punjab and...

South Africa is at a crossroads in its decentralization policy. On the one hand, it has declared its intention to strengthen the fiscal powers of local governments. On the other hand, the institutional arrangement necessary to guarantee fiscal decentralization, the power to raise local revenues,...