Taxation and Development: a Review of Donor Support to Strengthen Tax Systems in Developing Countries

Recent years have seen a growing interest among donors on taxation in developing countries. This reflects a concern for domestic revenue mobilization to finance public goods and services, as well as recognition of the centrality of taxation for growth and redistribution. The global financial crisis has also led many donor countries to pay more attention to the extent and effectiveness of the aid they provide, and to ensuring that they support rather than discourage the developing countries’ own revenue-raising efforts. This paper reviews the state of knowledge on aid and tax reform in developing countries, with a particular focus on sub-Saharan Africa. Four main issues are addressed: (1) impacts of donor assistance to strengthen tax systems, including what has worked, or not, and why; (2) challenges in ‘scaling up’ donor efforts; (3) how to best provide assistance to reform tax systems; and (4) knowledge gaps to be filled in order to design better donor interventions. The paper argues that donors should complement the traditional ‘technical’ approach to tax reform with measures that encourage constructive engagement between governments and citizens over tax issues.Department for International DevelopmentBill and Melinda Gates Foundatio

Seed system security assessment: Southern Sudan

A Seed System Security Assessment (SSSA) was carried out across Southern Sudan in November–December 2010. It reviewed the functioning of the seed systems farmers use, both formal and informal, and assessed whether farmers could access seed of adequate quantity and quality in the short and medium term. The work covered 8 states and 16 counties, chosen to anticipate the range of possible seed security constraints. Field research encompassed 885 farmer interviews, seed/grain market analysis, interviews with 70 traders, over 25 focus group discussions (including discussions with women’s groups), and key-informant sessions. Background papers were also commissioned on: a) the formal breeding sector’s structures and processes; b) the formal seed sector’s structures and processes; and c) current decentralized seed multiplication and distribution initiatives. This is among the more comprehensive agricultural and seed security assessments carried out nationwide, across Southern Sudan, in many decades

Seed system security assessment : Southern Sudan : November-December 2010

Juba, South Suda

The Dark Side of Transfer Pricing: Its Role in Tax Avoidance and Wealth Retentiveness

In conventional accounting literature, ?transfer pricing? is portrayed as a technique for optimal allocation of costs and revenues amongst divisions, subsidiaries and joint ventures within a group of related entities. Such representations of transfer pricing simultaneously acknowledge and occlude how it is deeply implicated in processes of wealth retentiveness that enable companies to avoid taxes and facilitate the flight of capital. A purely technical conception of transfer pricing calculations abstracts them from the politico-economic contexts of their development and use. The context is the modern corporation in an era of globalized trade and its relationship to state tax authorities, shareholders and other possible stakeholders. Transfer pricing practices are responsive to opportunities for determining values in ways that are consequential for enhancing private gains, and thereby contributing to relative social impoverishment, by avoiding the payment of public taxes. Evidence is provided by examining some of the transfer prices practices used by corporations to avoid taxes in developing and developed economies

The hand of accounting and accountancy firms in deepening income and wealth inequalities and the economic crisis: Some evidence

This paper looks at the economic crisis in the UK. It argues that everyday accounting practices are deeply implicated in the inequitable distribution of income and wealth, a major cause of the economic crisis engulfing the neoliberal economies. Without adequate purchasing power middle and low income households cannot make the purchases necessary for a sustained revival of the economic activity. Accounting calculations and discourses play a major role in the determination of wages and taxes. They prioritise the interests of capital over labour and the state and have systematically eroded labour's share of the gross domestic product. At the same time, despite a massive growth in corporate profitability, the UK state's share of the national wealth in the form of tax revenues has also declined. It is argued that accounting practices which label payment of wages to labour and payment of taxes to the state as ?costs? amplify capitalist concerns about private appropriation of surpluses and have played a major role in assigning such payments to negative spaces. Through the sale of tax avoidance schemes to corporations and wealthy elites, accountancy firms have facilitated a skewed distribution of income of wealth and further constrained the state's capacity to reflate the economy. Consequently, the tax burdens on the less well-off have increased and further eroded their purchasing power and possibilities of building a sustainable economy

Biofuels and the role of space in sustainable innovation journeys

This paper aims to identify the lessons that should be learnt from how biofuels have been envisioned from the aftermath of the oil shocks of the 1970s to the present,and how these visions compare with biofuel production networks emerging in the 2000s. Working at the interface of sustainable innovation journey research and geographical theories on the spatial unevenness of sustainability transition projects,we show how the biofuels controversy is linked to characteristics of globalised industrial agricultural systems. The legitimacy problems of biofuels cannot be addressed by sustainability indicators or new technologies alone since they arise from the spatial ordering of biofuel production. In the 1970-80s, promoters of bioenergy anticipated current concerns about food security implications but envisioned bioenergy production to be territorially embedded at national or local scales where these issues would be managed. Where the territorial and scalar vision was breached, it was to imagine poorer countries exporting higher-value biofuel to the North rather than the raw material as in the controversial global biomass commodity chains of today. However, controversy now extends to the global impacts of national biofuel systems on food security and greenhouse gas emissions, and to their local impacts becoming more widely known. South/South and North/North trade conflicts are also emerging as are questions over biodegradable wastes and agricultural residues as global commodities. As assumptions of a food-versus-fuel conflict have come to be challenged, legitimacy questions over global agri-business and trade are spotlighted even further. In this context, visions of biofuel development that address these broader issues might be promising. These include large-scale biomass-for-fuel models in Europe that would transform global trade rules to allow small farmers in the global South to compete, and smallscale biofuel systems developed to address local energy needs in the South

Achieving lasting peace in Angola The unfinished agenda; report of conference held at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, on 4 September 1997

Available from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:98/00590 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreSIGLEGBUnited Kingdo