Corruption, governance and tax revenues in Africa

Corruption and Decentralized Public Governance

This paper examines the conceptual and empirical basis of corruption and governance and concludes that decentralized local governance is conducive to reduced corruption in the long run. This is because localization helps to break the monopoly of power at the national level by bringing decision making closer to people. Localization strengthens government accountability to citizens by involving c...

Tax Compliance, Tax Morale and Governance Quality

Taxpayers are more compliant than the traditional economic models predict. Why? The literature calls it the “puzzle of tax compliance”. In this paper we use field, experimental and survey data to investigate the empirical evidence on whether presence of tax morale helps to resolve this puzzle. The results reveal a strong correlation between tax morale and tax evasion/compliance which confirms t...

Disparities Among Cities’ Sales Tax Revenues

Under what is known as the situs rule, a 1 percent locally levied sales tax is collected by the state but returned to the jurisdiction where the sale occurred. Thus, the situs rule gives cities an incentive to promote the location of retail businesses within their boundaries—an incentive that does not exist for residential or industrial development. Although sales taxes are a modest share of to...

Time Series Modelling of Daily Tax Revenues

We provide a detailed discussion of the time series modelling of daily tax revenues. The main feature of daily tax revenue series is the pattern within calendar months. Standard seasonal time series techniques cannot be used since the number of banking days per calendar month varies and because there are two levels of seasonality: between months and within months. We start the analysis with a p...

Poverty, corruption and governance in Fiji