Tax Enforcement, Inequality and Redistribution in sub-Saharan Africa: Four Essays in Empirical Economics
(2024)
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- Authors
- Supervisors
- Pariente, William
- Abstract
- Governments in low-income countries lack the resources to fund public goods and collect little tax revenue compared to the other countries. The first part of this thesis studies how the Senegalese administration can increase tax revenue by strengthening enforcement without modifying fiscal rules. In the first chapter, we randomize a deterrent communication campaign to show that leveraging large firms’ trading network to collect information about their suppliers is a cost-efficient way to detect tax evasion and increase future audit returns. In the second chapter, we exploit quasi-experimental variation in the introduction of electronic filing and payment to show that the adoption of such type of technology improves the quality of the information collected by the administration and increase payment recovery. Increasing tax revenue is only desirable if it allows governments to allocate resources more efficiently or more fairly than would private markets. Yet, we have very little empirical knowledge even simply about the levels of wealth, or income, inequality in low- and middle- income countries, and a fortiori about the incidence of governments’ intervention on individuals’ living standards. In the second part of the thesis, we consolidate survey and administrative data, with historical national accounts to describe the evolution of inequality in post-apartheid South Africa. The third chapter documents extreme levels of wealth inequality with no sign of decrease since 1994. The fourth chapter shows that pretax income inequality has increased, but that this rise has been overcompensated by major expansions in government redistribution. Racial inequalities have fallen mainly to the benefit of the top income group of Black Africans.
- Affiliations
Citations
Czajka, L. (2024). Tax Enforcement, Inequality and Redistribution in sub-Saharan Africa: Four Essays in Empirical Economics. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/217573