In many African countries, the amount of personal deduction for income tax purposes increases with the taxpayer's income. At first glance, this appears to give larger tax breaks to the rich than to the poor. On closer examination, this notion turns out to be false. As this paper shows, each tax...

The authors study the effects of regulation on economic growth and the relative size of the informal sector in a large sample of industrial and developing countries. Along with firm dynamics, informality is an important channel through which regulation affects macroeconomic performance and...

Recently, much attention has been paid in the literature on economic growth to the phenomenon of"conditional convergence,"the tendencies of economies with lower-level incomes to grow faster, conditional on their rate of factor accumulation. The author documents that, regardless of conditional...

Privatization has been a popular strategy for improving efficiency in both market and transition economies. The literature on privatization includes broad discussions of pricing techniques but overlooks tax issues. In reality, a state-owned company loses its privilege of paying no taxes once it...

Transferring ownership and control of enterprises from the public to the private sector has recently attracted great interest around the world. Several developed and developing countries have already divested varying portions of their public enterprise (PE) sectors, and many others are planning...

The authors are particularly interested in evaluating the concern that efficiency or policy-induced changes in the supply of exports of primary commodities, such as cocoa, coffee, and tea, may lead to such a large decline in the prices of those commodities that export revenues and incomes of the...

This paper examines Malawi's recent efforts to reform its tax system. Malawi embarked on a comprehensive tax reform with World Bank assistance in the latter half of the 1980s. This paper concentrates on the problems in the revenue system that provided the impetus to reform, the nature of the...

The author brings together two of government's primary challenges: environmental protection, and taxation to generate revenues. If negative externalities can be reduced not only by changes in consumption patterns, but also by making each activity cleaner (abatement efforts), how shall...

The authors explore the interaction between taxes on work-related traffic congestion and preexisting distortionary taxes in the labor market. A congestion tax raises the overall costs of commuting to work and discourages labor force participation at the margin when revenues are returned in...

Nearly a decade has passed since the Bank codified its position on cost recovery policies (OMS 2.25) for public sector projects. In a review of 13 sectors, the authors find that the Bank guidelines are followed fairly closely in seven sectors: coal, irrigation, oil/gas, power, roads,...