Zimbabwe is one of the least fiscally performing countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, with some fiscal outcomes for years 2009 to 2019 being unsatisfactory. The IMF 2020 Article IV consultation report on Zimbabwe suggested that fiscal and monetary slippages experienced in 2018 and 2019 resulted in...

Against the background of growing discontent over excessive leniency of US and EU competition policy, this article argues that the policy displays characteristics corresponding to those that brought about the social capture of financial policy co-responsible for the late 2000s global crisis. The...

The study examined the effectiveness of the Auditor General’s Office in enhancing public sector accountability in Zimbabwe. The public sector has been characterised by financial irregularities and mismanagement of funds (Bernard, 2009), yet the AG’s office exist to enhance accountability and...

The monopoly position of the public bureaucracy in providing public services allows government employees to acquire rents. Those rents can involve higher wages, monetary and non-monetary fringe benefits (e.g., pensions and staffing), and/or bribes. We propose a direct measure to capture the...

We show that isolated capital cities are robustly associated with greater levels of corruption across US states, in line with the view that this isolation reduces accountability. We then provide direct evidence that the spatial distribution of population relative to the capital affects different...

Using a panel data at the provincial level during the period of 1989–2004, this paper examines the effects of social and economic factors such as government scale, privatization, openness, and education on regional corruption. Applying a fixed-effect model and IV estimation, we find that...

We report results from a randomized policy experiment designed to test whether increased audit risk deters rent extraction in local public procurement and service delivery in Brazil. Our estimates suggest that temporarily increasing annual audit risk by about 20 percentage points reduced the...

Reducing corruption is one of the world’s many challenges. The fight against corruption is often discouraging. Yet, Europe continues to advance its anti-corruption initiatives. While the fight against has seen some victories, significant gains are few, especially in the Central and South...

Auditing institutions, such as the German Federal Court of Audit (BRH), provide information on public revenue and public spending. The question of how to increase tax compliance has been of frequent interest. Unfortunately, information from German taxpayers? declaration behaviour (beyond the...

Unlike economic theories of tax law enforcement, real income tax law application requires thorough interpretation of the law and the actual facts with regard to tax purposes. The automatic assessment produced by a computer program in German tax offices suggests the existence of a mechanically...