Papers under review

Cash transfers, informal taxation, and community participation: Evidence from south-central Somalia (with Fabrizio Santoro and Michael Walker) — R&R

• We investigate whether social protection programs can increase participation in community-driven development programs and examine how this affects state-citizen relations. Using a randomized controlled trial in south-central Somalia, we study the impacts of an unconditional cash transfer program to vulnerable households that was designed specifically to encourage participation in community development. We collect survey data before and after the intervention with almost 600 individuals eligible to receive cash transfers. We find no substantial differences in welfare or participation in community development projects for cash transfer recipient households relative to vulnerable non-recipient households. However, we do find positive impacts of the cash transfers on citizen perceptions of non-state community leaders and the local government, despite the local government playing no direct role in the social protection program. Our findings suggest that relatively small social protection interventions may face challenges in increasing vulnerable households’ participation in community development and decision-making, while also highlighting potential positive spillover effects for state-citizen relations in contexts with weak formal institutions.

‘A disease of air-conditioned rooms’: Gendered Geographies and Vaccine Hesitancy Among Informal Workers (with Max Gallien, Shandana Mohmand, and Umair Javed) — R&R

• Are informal workers, who have less or more contentious experiences with the state, more vaccine hesitant? This paper explores attitudes towards Covid-19 vaccination programmes from the perspectives of informal workers in the context of Lahore, Pakistan, where we draw on in-depth conversations with 93 informal workers across four sectors. What we find is a surprising disconnect between vaccine scepticism and actual decisions to get the vaccine. Those that are vaccinated did not necessarily believe in its effectiveness, while, contrary to our expectations, trust in the state did not seem a critical factor in shaping health-seeking behaviour. We also observed striking sectoral variation in perceptions of the pandemic and willingness to get vaccinated, with greater scepticism and hesitancy among male-dominated street vendors and transport workers, than among female home-based manufacturing and domestic workers. We argue that this is driven by gendered geographies of labour and public space, which determine workers’ experience of lockdowns and cross-class interactions. Our findings contribute to highlighting heterogeneous dynamics within the informal economy, and to ways in which gendered geographies of work and movement can play a critical role in shaping responses to public health measures, likely beyond the context of informal work.

The politics of taxation and tax reform in times of crisis: Covid-19 and attitudes towards taxation in Sierra Leone (with Wilson Prichard and Nicolas Orgeira) — R&R

• The Covid-19 pandemic has had significant fiscal implications around the world. A key question facing governments is whether and how the pandemic has shaped taxpayer attitudes and what that means for the prospects for tax reform and new revenue raising in the wake of the pandemic. We aim to understand the impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic on attitudes toward taxation and, in turn, to unpack what the crisis reveals about the dynamics and politics of taxation more broadly. We do so in the context of Sierra Leone with novel survey data, collected before the pandemic, shortly after the pandemic’s onset, and for almost a year afterwards. Four key findings emerge. First, immediately after the onset of the crisis we see increased support for taxation in Freetown, despite escalating economic challenges. Second, however, we also see taxpayers express increasingly conditional attitudes toward taxation; that is, at the same time that they show greater general support for taxation they become more likely to believe that one could refuse to pay taxes if government fails to deliver services in return. Third, while we lack baseline data before the pandemic on support for progressive taxation, we find rising and sustained support for progressive taxation over the course of the pandemic. Finally, although we see an initial increase in support for taxation immediately after the onset of the pandemic, we find evidence of that support eroding over time, potentially reflecting a combination of continued economic hardship or declining feelings of social solidarity. These findings have potentially significant implications for understanding both immediate responses to the pandemic, and the broader politics of taxation and tax reform. 

Between God, the people and the state: Situating zakat in modern Muslim-majority states (with Max Gallien and Umair Javed)

• Although precise estimates of the volume of zakat paid every year are difficult to come by, it is a substantial part of social spending: the annual global zakat pool is estimated to make up between 200 billion and 1 trillion USD. How do citizens in modern Muslim-majority countries conceive of zakat? In this paper, we explore how citizens in Muslim-majority countries zakat, attempting to situate it between religion, charity, and the state. In particular, we ask how the role of the state in zakat affects how citizens conceive of and situate the practice. There is substantial variety in the organisation and function of zakat today, with critical differences in the degree to which states have involved themselves in zakat practices and the respective relationships between citizens, states and other governance providers. It seems plausible that a greater role of the state in zakat, including top-down legal mandates, people may think of zakat more like a tax than a religious contribution. We explore this possibility in the context of Morocco, Pakistan, and Egypt, combining conceptual discussions of zakat, formal and informal taxation and charity with an empirical exploration of zakat practices today. We draw on three nationally representative surveys conducted simultaneously in 2020 and covering over 5000 respondents and over 2,500 zakat payers. 

Zakat, tax, and redistribution: Obligation and charity in times of Covid-19 (with Max Gallien and Umair Javed)

• In order to soften the economic fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic, states have introduced formal tax reliefs in various forms. At the same time, they are encouraging charitable contributions in order to finance relief efforts. In Muslim-majority states, zakat payments make up a significant part of the fiscal politics of social spending – the annual global zakat pool is estimated between 200 billion and 1 trillion USD. In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, some states have been encouraging citizens to increase charitable contributions, and tied zakat distribution to pandemic relief. This brings into focus long-standing questions about the position of zakat between charity, formal, and informal taxation. Based on original survey data of over 5,000 respondents in Egypt, Pakistan, and Morocco, the project examines how different forms of state involvement in zakat collection have shaped public attitudes towards taxation, charity and the state during a pandemic.

Catch them if you can: The politics and practice of a taxpayer registration exercise (with Max Gallien and Giovanni Occhiali)

• Tax registration drives have become an increasingly popular intervention to expand the coverage of tax nets across Sub-Saharan Africa. However, doubts have recently been casted on their impacts, as there is increasing evidence that they do not lead to substantial revenue increase and might skew the tax registry towards overrepresenting vulnerable groups. Little explanation for these outcomes is available for why this is the case, as the literature focuses on the outcomes of these exercises rather than on their processes and premises. We seek to fill this gap through an evaluation of a tax registration exercise of small and medium-sized enterprises in Freetown, Sierra Leone implemented by the National Revenue Authority. We argue that the conflicting objectives between national and international stakeholders, as well as between street- and higher-level officials, combined with a technocratic view of the exercise which underestimate its political nature, led to its likely unsatisfactory outcome in revenue terms. However, we also identify non-revenue outcomes that may still be seen as positive from the perspectives of policymakers, such as familiarising many businesses with a revenue authority they previously had very little engagement with. While this outcome of registration exercises is frequently overlooked by similar evaluations, it is one that local officials recognize as important in “building future taxpayers”.

Engendering taxation: A research and policy agenda (with Anuradha Joshi and Jalia Kangave)

• In recent years, increased attention has been paid to the gender dimensions of taxation, though there has been limited research on the subject, particularly in lower income contexts. This paper reviews the existing literature and related debates on gender and tax in low-income countries, identifying knowledge gaps, and mapping broader issues that are relevant to understanding the gendered impacts of taxation. The paper makes four broad observations.  First, there has been insufficient gender-disaggregated data analysis, which is required to draw generalizable conclusions about the gendered impacts of tax policy. First, though existing research focuses on formal direct taxes, these are less relevant for women in lower income contexts, given high participation rates in the informal economy. Instead, presumptive taxes, user fees, and informal taxes place a disproportionate burden on low-income women. Third, there needs to be greater attention paid to the ways in which women in senior and junior positions in tax administration can affect how taxpayers interact with tax authorities. Finally, any assessment of the impacts of tax policy on gender needs to consider revenues and expenditures together to ensure that the positive effects of tax policies are not undermined by budgets or vice versa. We conclude by showing that, with the few exceptions outlined above, tax policy and administration is often an unwieldy instrument to address gender equity; instead, other policies related to labour markets, social protection, and public services can target gender equity more directly.

Informal taxes fill gaps in state crisis responses: Evidence from Sierra Leone during Covid-19 (with Wilson Prichard and Nicolas Orgeira)

• Bottom-up responses to the Covid-19 pandemic have been critical in supporting some of the most vulnerable groups throughout the crisis and have often served as powerful symbols of solidarity. There has been less attention paid, however, to the implications of shifting the burdens of crisis relief and social welfare provision downward to already vulnerable populations. We explore the impact and implications of crisis-related informal tax contributions in Sierra Leone, relying on a unique dataset tracking tax contributions and taxpayer perceptions from March 2020 to February 2021. Five key findings emerge. First, in the context of negative economic impacts and the limited and uneven reach of state economic relief, more than a third of individuals paid new informal taxes to help finance the pandemic response.  Second, new informal contributions mostly went to financing preventative measures, including hand-washing stations and community sensitization, rather than social welfare or protection. Our data thus points to remaining gaps in pandemic relief and recovery, with informal bottom-up crisis responses constrained by the economic hardships facing individuals, including significant increases in poverty and food insecurity. Third, despite increases in informal taxes, overall burdens do not consistently increase, suggesting that communities pivoted their support to areas of need, rather than increasing informal fiscal burdens. Fourth, wealthier individuals were more likely to make informal contributions at the start of the pandemic, indicating some degree of progressivity, at least at the extensive margin. Finally, despite the insufficiency government pandemic relief and the prevalence of informal taxes to finance preventative measures, views of the fairness of informal taxes have been relatively positive and perceptions of overall government performance during the pandemic have been relatively high. These findings have important implications for our understandings of local perceptions of the fairness of informal financing mechanisms and broader citizen expectations of the state. 

Works in progress

Informal revenue generation and the state: Evidence from Sierra Leone (book manuscript)

• In this project, I explore the relationship between informal tax institutions and the state. My research asks whether informal taxation contributes to or crowds out the development of more effective formal structures, and considers the conditions under which informal taxation plays a complementary or competitive role with the state. I inductively develop a theoretical framework to explore variation in the nature of relationships between informal taxing actors and the state. I show that informal tax institutions can bolster state authority and state building in unexpected ways. Informal tax institutions can act as brokers of state building, while states may use these institutions to bolster their own authority. The result is that states may seek to sustain informal processes and outcomes, even where we may expect that they would challenge the state’s legitimacy. Critically, I show that the politics of state building are in part played out in conjunction with informal institutions, forcing us to reconsider the notion and structures of statehood in practice. 

• My analysis draws on a mixed methods research design, combining a largescale survey of taxpayers; over 300 in-depth interviews with key stakeholders, including community and government leaders; over 50 focus group discussions with community leaders, chiefdom authorities, and taxpayers; the compilation of public revenue sources and handwritten informal tax records; the consultation of historical records; and ethnographic immersion over more than a year of fieldwork.  

• My dissertation, which forms the basis for this book project, was awarded the 2019-2020 Canadian Political Science Association Vincent Lemieux Prize, recognizing “the best PhD thesis submitted at a Canadian institution, in English or in French, in any sub-field of political science, judged eminently worth of publication in the form of a book or articles”. The prize jury notes that, the work “is an example of innovative research in political economy…The theoretical framework is sound, and the author manages to integrate the current literature but also brings her own contributions. It is also an excellent empirical project that includes an original survey and hundreds of interviews. It is well written but does not sacrifice sophistication to parsimony. It is also argued with rigour and clarity, and presented in a way that makes it interesting and accessible to diverse audiences in political science.”

The political economy of taxation in Somalia (with Najibullah Nor Isak)

• Somalia has the weakest tax capacity in the world. In many ways, this is unsurprising given the collapse of the state in 1991 and the instability that has followed. In this paper, however, we argue that an analysis of taxation in Somalia cannot begin with the collapse of the state, drawing attention to understudied legacies of colonialism and conflict that shape the political economic dynamics that limit the contemporary state’s capacity and will to tax. Relying on historical and qualitative interview data and applying a political settlements analysis, we argue that top-down or technocratic institutional reform will not succeed if it does not transform underlying political and social relations and informal institutions. We show how the historical legacies of colonialism, a post-conflict authoritarian regime, and civil war gave rise to informal institutions, norms, and networks that continue to undermine the state’s capacity and will to expand taxation, particularly as it relates to the business community. In this context, informal institutions of tax negotiation, the unwillingness to introduce new taxes or expand the tax base, and the forbearance of tax enforcement has a political logic that can be explained through three central mechanisms. First, the discretion and autonomy afforded by the weakness of the current system enables rent-seeking by front-line tax officials and collectors, while the broader institutionalization of informality benefits would-be corporate taxpayers. Second, the intertwining of networks among political and economic elite underpins the disincentives of senior administrative officials and politicians to extend taxation on the business community. Third, the critical role that the business community has played in enabling stability and supporting state institutions over time further limits incentives to expand business taxation.  In light of significant international investment in tax policy and administrative reform and some successes in recent years, we consider ways in which resistance to reform has been overcome in this context. We fundamentally argue that tax reform will fail unless it addresses the overarching elite bargains and political settlements that represent the greatest obstacle to reform. Concretely, reform has been possible where it has evaded the attention of would-be resisters, strengthened popular support for reform, or otherwise distributed the benefits of institutional reform. Most critically, reform has been possible where international development partners have put pressure on the government to undertake reforms, even when misaligned with the political settlement in the short-term. Though such strategies represent risks for instability and sustainability, in the longer-term they can transform underlying social relations and support the development of a more inclusive political settlement and society. In effect, international support can be used to strategically “unsettle” or reshape political settlements, increasing and broadening the number of actors with an interest in formal institutions. This analysis illustrates the value and necessity of analysing political settlements in order to deepen our understanding of what is possible in terms of institutional reform and fiscal capacity building.

Labour, tax, and development: Shifting norms around labour taxes from the colonial era to today 

• Informal labour taxes have a long history in former African colonies, though they have not been included in analyses of individual tax burdens and the effective revenue of labour taxes has not been recorded by formal public finance institutions. They have taken a number of forms—from conscripted labour for public works projects in the colonial era to mandated communal labour in the post-independence era—and have been integral to the expansion of state authority. I explore informal labour taxes in Sierra Leone from the colonial period to the present day. I rely on historical records, a unique dataset capturing contemporary informal labour contributions, and over a year of qualitative data collection and ethnographic immersion in nine chiefdom case studies. I trace the perceived legitimacy of informal labour taxes over time, showing how they went from being perceived as “forced labour” to being openly embraced by states and development partners. Once normalized by colonial authorities, a growing international labour movement caused them to be seen as illegitimate. Over time, however, they were reframed by the colonial state as part of “traditional” obligations, with the colonial state legitimizing and institutionalizing them in colonial law. In the post-independence period, there was continuity in the state’s engagement with informal labour taxes, which were seen as central to the “self-reliance” movement. Later shifts in development theory and praxis saw informal labour taxes as indicators of “ownership”, “participation”, and “sustainability”. Accordingly, informal labour taxes have been revived and re-legitimized by the epistemic development community. Though the relative legitimacy of informal labour taxes has shifted over time, states and development partners insufficiently appreciate the burden of mandatory unpaid labour on individuals, as well as how informal labour taxes have contributed to the expansion of state power over time.

Informal revenue generation and inequality in the DRC

• Using original quantitative and qualitative data from the eastern DRC, I am completing a paper project assessing the distributional effects of informal taxation on quality and access to a broader range of public goods. 

Feed the hand that doesn't bite you: Informality, tax and markets in Kinshasa (with Yannick Bokasola and Eddy Ngwakoyo)

Informal workers and the state: The politics of connection and disconnection during the pandemic in India (with Max Gallien and Harshita Sinha) 

Data collection in progress

Gender and taxation in Accra's informal economy (with Nana Akua Anyidoho, Max Gallien, and Mike Rogan)

Informal taxation and the provision of "free" public education: The impacts of a policy reform in Sierra Leone

The role of chiefs in supplementing or undermining the state: Evidence from local governments in Sierra Leone

The logic of armed group taxation: A new dataset (with Tanya Bandula-Irwin, Max Gallien,  Ashley Jackson, and Florian Weigand)