Pathways Into the Tax Net: Better Ways to Register African Taxpayers

ICTD African Tax Administration Paper 34

Based on recent experience in a range of African countries, we list some taxpayer registration practices that should be abandoned or used sparingly, and some that should be used more widely, to better target registration on those businesses and individuals who should be paying tax.

Does Competition from the Informal Sector Reduce Tax Compliance in the Formal Sector? Evidence from Ethiopia

ICTD Working Paper 165

It is widely believed that the existence of ‘informal sector’ enterprises that visibly do not pay direct taxes reduces the willingness of owners of formal, tax-registered enterprises to pay their own taxes. We call this the adverse evasion spillover hypothesis. It is for several reasons hard...

Mick Moore & 2 others

The Alternatives to Universal Tax Registration in Sri Lanka

This note argues that the Sri Lankan government’s recent proposal to implement universal tax registration is neither a viable nor effective strategy to increase the country’s tax revenue. Instead, the note proposes four alternative measures that are more feasible, while still serving the...

Mick Moore

Nishan de Mel

Tax Obsessions: Taxpayer Registration and the Informal Sector in sub-Saharan Africa

Motivation: There are three puzzling features of sub-Saharan African tax systems: tax administrations maintain records on vast numbers of small enterprises that actually provide no revenue; they continually invest resources into registering even more of these “unproductive taxpayers”; and...

Mick Moore