The COVID-19 pandemic has hit sub-Saharan African economies hard, exacerbating debt and debt servicing cost issues that a range of countries in the region - including Ghana and Nigeria - already faced. This report examines the fiscal context in sub-Saharan Africa and the issues and options for...

The IFS Green Budget 2018, in association with Citi, ICAEW and the Nuffield Foundation, is edited by Carl Emmerson, Christine Farquharson and Paul Johnson, and copy-edited by Judith Payne. The report looks at the issues and challenges facing Chancellor Philip Hammond as he prepares for his...

As in high-income countries, reduced rates of VAT and VAT exemptions ("preferential VAT rates") are a common feature of indirect tax systems in LMICs. Many of the goods and services that are granted preferential rates - such as foodstuffs and kerosene - seem likely to receive such treatment on...

In its 2020 Ghana CARES 'Obaatanpa' programme, the Government of Ghana emphasised the need to improve domestic revenue mobilisation in order to ensure the realisation of its medium-term fiscal policy and development objectives. In the context of ambitious revenue mobilisation goals and a...

This chapter considers inequalities across ethnic groups in the United Kingdom and finds that there is no single story of advantage or disadvantage. Ethnic inequalities are complex and characterised simultaneously by continuity rooted in historical origins and conditions, and rapid change...

Ration shop systems allow households to purchase limited quantities of some commodities at a fi xed subsidized price and are in widespread use throughout the developing world. I construct a model of piece-wise increasing commodity taxation to consider whether the use of ration shops can be...

Do tax systems distort firm-to-firm trade? This paper considers the effect of tax policy on supplier networks in a large developing economy, the state of West Bengal in India. Using administrative panel data on firms, including transaction data for 4.8 million supplier-client pairs, we first...

Can consumption taxes reduce inequality in developing countries? We combine household expenditure data from 31 countries with theory to shed new light on the redistributive potential and optimal design of consumption taxes. We use the place of purchase of each expenditure to proxy for informal...

In-kind transfers can provide insurance benefits when prices of consumption goods vary, as is common in developing countries. We develop a model demonstrating that in-kind transfers are welfare improving to beneficiaries relative to cash if the covariance between the marginal utility of income...