Taxing Africa

Taxation has been seen as the domain of charisma-free accountants, lawyers and number crunchers – an unlikely place to encounter big societal questions about democracy, equity or good governance. Yet it is exactly these issues that pervade conversations about taxation among policymakers, tax collectors, civil society activists, journalists and foreign aid donors in Africa today. Tax has become viewed as central to African development. Written by leading international experts, Taxing Africa offers a cutting-edge analysis on all aspects of the continent’s tax regime, displaying the crucial role such arrangements have on attempts to create social justice and push economic advancement. From tax evasion by multinational corporations and African elites to how ordinary people navigate complex webs of ‘informal’ local taxation, the book examines the potential for reform, and how space might be created for enabling locally-led strategies. The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC 3.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com

Comment les gouvernements de pays à faible revenu peuvent-ils augmenter leurs recettes fiscales ?

government revenue; low-income countries; transfer mispricing; mining tax; tax exemptions; property taxes; tax treaties.It is widely believed that the governments of many low-income countries, and especially the relatively poor performers, should be aiming to increase the proportion of GDP they raise in tax revenue. There are risks in emphasising increasing revenue at the expense of other objectives. Governments also need to be concerned with questions of equity, efficiency, trust and reciprocity, among others. However, the question of how governments can further increase revenue is a central part of that broader story. It is a big question. We address it by answering three more precise questions: 1) Which specific potential revenue sources do governments generally tend to under-exploit? This leads to a list of eight ways of potentially increasing revenue: more actively and effectively combating the transfer mispricing activities of transnational firms; taxing mining activities better; increasing excise taxes on tobacco and alcohol; reducing tax exemptions for investors; implementing valued added tax (VAT) more effectively; more actively taxing the income and assets of the fast-expanding numbers of rich citizens; taxing more heavily the ownership and occupation of urban real estate; and obliging government agencies to be better ‘tax citizens’; 2) What are the possibilities of increasing revenue through generally improving tax administration? There seems to be considerable potential, notably to use information and communications technology (ICT) facilities more effectively to manage core business processes, including accounting for tax revenue receipts in more integrated, centralised and transparent ways; 3) What is the scope for increasing revenue through changes to both domestic and international tax policies? Some of the more promising possibilities are: complementing corporate profit taxes with taxes on turnover; signing fewer bilateral international tax treaties; more regional inter-governmental cooperation around a range of tax policy issues; and improving the tools for taxing wealthy individuals. Tax is very political, but so are many things that governments need to do. There is no reason to believe that political obstacles to reform are unusually high in the tax area.On estime généralement que les gouvernements de nombreux pays à faible revenu, et en particulier les moins performants, devraient chercher à accroître la proportion de leur PIB qu'ils soulèvent via les recettes fiscales. Mettre l'accent sur l'augmentation des recettes au détriment d'autres objectifs comporte des risques. Les gouvernements doivent également se préoccuper notamment des questions d'équité, d'efficience, de confiance et de la réciprocité. Cependant, la question de la façon dont les gouvernements peuvent augmenter les recettes est un élément central dans ce contexte global. C'est une grande question que nous examinons ici à travers trois questions plus précises: 1) Quelles sont les sources potentielles de recettes que les gouvernements ont généralement tendance à sous-exploiter? Cela conduit à une liste de huit manières d'augmenter potentiellement les recettes: lutter plus activement et efficacement contre les mauvaises évaluations des transferts au sein des entreprises transnationales; mieux taxer les activités minières ; augmenter les taxes d'accise sur le tabac et l'alcool; réduire les exemptions fiscales pour les investisseurs ; mieux mettre en oeuvre la taxe sur la valeur ajoutée (TVA), taxer plus activement les revenus et les actifs des citoyens riches qui sont de plus en plus nombreux, taxer plus lourdement la propriété et l'occupation de l'immobilier urbain; et d'obliger les organismes gouvernementaux d’être de meilleurs "citoyens de l’impôt"; 2) Quelles sont les possibilités d'augmenter les revenus à travers des améliorations générales au sein de l'administration fiscale? Il semble y avoir un potentiel considérable, notamment en utilisant des systèmes de technologies de l’information et des communications (TIC) pour gérer plus efficacement les processus opérationnels de base - y compris la comptabilisation des rentrées de recettes fiscales - de manière plus intégrée, centralisée et transparente; 3) Quelle est la marge potentielle d'augmentation des recettes grâce à des changements des politiques fiscales à la fois au niveau national et international? Certaines des possibilités les plus prometteuses sont: compléter l'impôt sur les bénéfices des sociétés par une taxation du chiffre d'affaires ; signer moins de conventions fiscales internationales bilatérales; développer les coopérations intergouvernementales à l’échelle régionale autour d'un éventail de questions de politique fiscale; et améliorer les outils pour l'imposition des riches particuliers.Department for International DevelopmentBill and Melinda Gates Foundatio

Key transmission parameters of an institutional outbreak during the 1918 influenza pandemic estimated by mathematical modelling

AIM: To estimate the key transmission parameters associated with an outbreak of pandemic influenza in an institutional setting (New Zealand 1918). METHODS: Historical morbidity and mortality data were obtained from the report of the medical officer for a large military camp. A susceptible-exposed-infectious-recovered epidemiological model was solved numerically to find a range of best-fit estimates for key epidemic parameters and an incidence curve. Mortality data were subsequently modelled by performing a convolution of incidence distribution with a best-fit incidence-mortality lag distribution. RESULTS: Basic reproduction number (R(0)) values for three possible scenarios ranged between 1.3, and 3.1, and corresponding average latent period and infectious period estimates ranged between 0.7 and 1.3 days, and 0.2 and 0.3 days respectively. The mean and median best-estimate incidence-mortality lag periods were 6.9 and 6.6 days respectively. This delay is consistent with secondary bacterial pneumonia being a relatively important cause of death in this predominantly young male population. CONCLUSION: These R(0 )estimates are broadly consistent with others made for the 1918 influenza pandemic and are not particularly large relative to some other infectious diseases. This finding suggests that if a novel influenza strain of similar virulence emerged then it could potentially be controlled through the prompt use of major public health measures

Building Tax Capacity in Developing Countries

The agenda for the Third International Conference on Financing for Development suggests there will be less focus on aid, and more on how developing countries can generate their own financial resources for development. Governments will be urged to tax more effectively, and donors will be called upon to help build capacity in developing country tax administrations. While there is considerable evidence that donor support can enhance tax capacity, success is not guaranteed. In order for such programmes to be effective, they will need to be responsive to local contexts, be designed to prioritise building trust, offer long-term mentoring, target the right range of institutions, and facilitate South-South collaboration

QoE-Oriented Mobile Edge Service Management Leveraging SDN and NFV

5G envisages a "hyperconnected society" where trillions of diverse entities could communicate with each other anywhere and at any time, some of which will demand extremely challenging performance requirements such as submillisecond low latency. Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) concept where application computing resources are deployed at the edge of the mobile network in proximity of an end user is a promising solution to improve quality of online experience. To make MEC more flexible and cost-effective Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV) and Software-Defined Networking (SDN) technologies are widely adopted. It leads to significant CAPEX and OPEX reduction with the help of a joint radio-cloud management and orchestration logic. In this paper we discuss and develop a reference architecture for the orchestration and management of the MEC ecosystem. Along with the lifecycle management flows of MEC services, indicating the interactions among the functional modules inside the Orchestrator and with external elements, QoS management with a focus on the channel state information technique is presented.The research leading to these results has been supported by the EU funded H2020 5G-PPP project SESAME under the Grant Agreement no. 671596 and National Spanish Projects QoEverage (no. TEC2013-46766-R) and ONOFRE (no. TEC2014-53071-C3-1-P)

Mental health, deprivation, and the neighbourhood social environment: a network analysis

Different aspects of the neighbourhood social environment have been linked with mental ill-health, however the mechanisms underlying these associations remain poorly understood because of the number and complexity of the components involved. We used a novel statistical approach, network analysis, to explore the complex associations between neighbourhood social cohesion, social disorder and mental health symptoms in a sample of 3,670 adults from an economically deprived region of the UK (mean age [SD] = 49.34 years [18.87]; 57% female). Elasso regularised networks were estimated, and network comparisons were conducted by level of deprivation. Mental health symptoms and neighbourhood components formed relatively distinct clusters of items. These domains were linked primarily by paranoia, although only in the most deprived group. Drunken/rowdy behaviour was particularly influential within the neighbourhood cluster, therefore policies aimed at reducing such disruptive behaviour could have positive knock-on effects for social cohesion and mental health