Taxation and Livelihoods: A Review of the Evidence from Fragile and Conflict-Affected Rural Areas

Despite growing interest in the connections between taxation, development and governance, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the relationship between taxation and people’s livelihoods, particularly in places affected by war and violent conflict. Yet, it is in these landscapes that people encounter particularly fierce challenges to livelihood recovery, often finding themselves operating in a political economy environment that is at once complex and shifting, as well as brutal and exploitative. And it is also in these contexts that questions around public goods provision and state-society relations carry most weight – places affected badly by conflict tend to have urgent service-related needs, and violent conflicts can erode trust in governance actors. Through a selective review of key literature, we argue in this paper that if we are truly interested in the relationships between taxation and livelihoods, then an exclusive focus on formal taxation is inadequate. Subsequently, we suggest widening our analytical lens to include what might be referred to as ‘informal tax’ – that is, payments and costs (for example, in relation to labour time) which are incurred outside formal statutory arrangements, the benefits of which may be accrued by a variety of state, non-state and community actors or institutions. In reality, the lines between formal and informal taxation are likely to be blurred. Nevertheless, a broad analytical focus on taxation, which captures both its formal and informal dimensions, may be defined as: all payments – whether cash or in kind, including labour time – that are made as a result of the exercise of political power, social sanction or armed force (as opposed to market exchange). Further research is needed to explore these issues, and this working paper can be considered the first step of an ongoing joint research project by the International Centre for Tax and Development (ICTD) and Secure Livelihoods Research Consortium (SLRC) to address this need. We hope that this work will have implications for how national and international actors think about both support to livelihoods and processes of state-building in fragile and conflictaffected situations. Projects aimed at supporting livelihoods are usually focused on trying to increase people’s income or productive capacities: aid agencies distribute seeds, provide loans to small businesses and try to stimulate value chains. The expenditure side of the equation is largely ignored in attempts to support livelihoods – what people have to spend in order to keep their children in school, get treatment when they are sick, buy and sell produce, travel to and from towns, and establish and maintain businesses. A focus on taxation may therefore open up opportunities for new thinking about how to support livelihoods that takes both expenditure and income into account. A better understanding of how taxation works at the local level may also contribute to debates around governance and state-building in fragile and conflict-affected situations. These have often been framed around the idea that if the state can be supported to do more for its citizens – for example, by delivering basic services and ensuring security – then legitimacy gains will follow. However, what tends to be neglected in such debates is the question of how state actors could become less predatory and extractive. Indeed, the effects of predatory state behaviour may be just as, if not more, significant in shaping state-society relations than the effects of supportive behaviour and actions. Similarly, the inability or unwillingness of states to regulate extractive behaviour by other actors may be perceived and understood as a visible failure of authority. Thus, a focus on the realities of how people 4 are taxed at the local level – and an examination of whether extractive state activities could be better linked to the provision of services – may generate important insights into difficult processes of state-building in conflict-affected situations. Finally, it is hoped that future research into the issues outlined in this paper might help to pinpoint opportunities for positive change in local-level tax policies in fragile and conflictaffected situations. Identifying possible entry points for reform – for example, through applied political economy analysis – would help researchers and policymakers understand in which areas or sectors reforms would be most valuable, what the particulars of their design might look like, and what the political viability of different kinds of reform would be in practice.SLRC, DfID, NORA

Towards more inclusive, effective and impartial humanitarian action

Failing to include people who are marginalised and discriminated against is not a failure of inclusion but a failure of humanitarian action. Humanitarian actors’ commitment to impartiality requires a focus on prioritising the most urgent cases and non-discrimination. Evidence shows that humanitarian responses often fail to effectively assist and protect those most urgent cases. They can also further exacerbate existing marginalisation and discrimination. Based on a three-year study on inclusion and exclusion in humanitarian action, this policy brief outlines the changes and steps necessary to move towards more inclusive, impartial and effective humanitarian responses. It calls for recentring humanitarian action on effectiveness, relevance and impartiality by adopting a strategic vision for tracking exclusion and supporting more inclusive humanitarian action

Inclusion and exclusion in humanitarian action: findings from a three-year study

In recent years, the humanitarian sector has started paying more attention to those it leaves behind, such as people with disabilities, older people and speakers of minority languages. Since their needs are so often sidelined amid efforts to serve as many people as quickly as possible, this development is both welcome and overdue. In practice, however, translating attention to inclusion into action remains an uphill struggle. This report seeks to explain why, and to suggest what to do about it. It draws on findings from a three-year research project by the Humanitarian Policy Group (HPG) focused on understanding the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion in humanitarian action, including case studies in north-east Nigeria; the Rohingya refugee response in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh; the urban refugee response in Jordan; and the complex mix of post-conflict recovery and natural-hazard-related disasters in Mindanao, the Philippines

Reconstructing Four Centuries of Temperature-Induced Coral Bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef

Mass coral bleaching events during the last 20 years have caused major concern over the future of coral reefs worldwide. Despite damage to key ecosystem engineers, little is known about bleaching frequency prior to 1979 when regular modern systematic scientific observations began on the Great Barrier Reef (GBR). To understand the longer-term relevance of current bleaching trajectories, the likelihood of future coral acclimatization and adaptation, and thus persistence of corals, records, and drivers of natural pre-industrial bleaching frequency and prevalence are needed. Here, we use linear extensions from 44 overlapping GBR coral cores to extend the observational bleaching record by reconstructing temperature-induced bleaching patterns over 381 years spanning 1620–2001. Porites spp. corals exhibited variable bleaching patterns with bleaching frequency (number of bleaching years per decade) increasing (1620–1753), decreasing (1754–1820), and increasing (1821–2001) again. Bleaching prevalence (the proportion of cores exhibiting bleaching) fell (1670–1774) before increasing by 10% since the late 1790s concurrent with positive temperature anomalies, placing recently observed increases in GBR coral bleaching into a wider context. Spatial inconsistency along with historically diverging patterns of bleaching frequency and prevalence provide queries over the capacity for holobiont (the coral host, the symbiotic microalgae and associated microorganisms) acclimatization and adaptation via bleaching, but reconstructed increases in bleaching frequency and prevalence, may suggest coral populations are reaching an upper bleaching threshold, a “tipping point” beyond which coral survival is uncertain

Oceanic forcing of interannual and multidecadal climate variability in the southwestern Indian Ocean: evidence from a 160 year coral isotopic record (La Réunion, 55°E, 21°S)

We have developed a new 163-year bimonthly coral δ18O record from La Réunion (55°E, 21°S). Interannual variations in coral δ18O are coherent with the Southern Oscillation Index but not with regional sea surface temperature (SST). Correlations with the global SST field suggest more negative seawater δ18O (δ18Osw) during La Niña years. We propose that the signal results from changes in the strength of the South Equatorial Current and the Indonesian throughflow, which carry low salinity water. Multidecadal variations in coral δ18O are coherent with regional SST, but the sign is of opposite sense as expected from the coral δ18O-temperature relationship. This requires multidecadal changes in salinity large enough to overprint the SST contribution in the coral δ18O record. Our results suggest that multidecadal salinity variations result from modulations in the transport of the South Equatorial Current, which varies in response to the surface wind field and/or the Indonesian throughflow

Historical Temperature Variability Affects Coral Response to Heat Stress

Coral bleaching is the breakdown of symbiosis between coral animal hosts and their dinoflagellate algae symbionts in response to environmental stress. On large spatial scales, heat stress is the most common factor causing bleaching, which is predicted to increase in frequency and severity as the climate warms. There is evidence that the temperature threshold at which bleaching occurs varies with local environmental conditions and background climate conditions. We investigated the influence of past temperature variability on coral susceptibility to bleaching, using the natural gradient in peak temperature variability in the Gilbert Islands, Republic of Kiribati. The spatial pattern in skeletal growth rates and partial mortality scars found in massive Porites sp. across the central and northern islands suggests that corals subject to larger year-to-year fluctuations in maximum ocean temperature were more resistant to a 2004 warm-water event. In addition, a subsequent 2009 warm event had a disproportionately larger impact on those corals from the island with lower historical heat stress, as indicated by lower concentrations of triacylglycerol, a lipid utilized for energy, as well as thinner tissue in those corals. This study indicates that coral reefs in locations with more frequent warm events may be more resilient to future warming, and protection measures may be more effective in these regions

Disturbance and the Dynamics of Coral Cover on the Great Barrier Reef (1995–2009)

Coral reef ecosystems worldwide are under pressure from chronic and acute stressors that threaten their continued existence. Most obvious among changes to reefs is loss of hard coral cover, but a precise multi-scale estimate of coral cover dynamics for the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) is currently lacking. Monitoring data collected annually from fixed sites at 47 reefs across 1300 km of the GBR indicate that overall regional coral cover was stable (averaging 29% and ranging from 23% to 33% cover across years) with no net decline between 1995 and 2009. Subregional trends (10–100 km) in hard coral were diverse with some being very dynamic and others changing little. Coral cover increased in six subregions and decreased in seven subregions. Persistent decline of corals occurred in one subregion for hard coral and Acroporidae and in four subregions in non-Acroporidae families. Change in Acroporidae accounted for 68% of change in hard coral. Crown-of-thorns starfish (Acanthaster planci) outbreaks and storm damage were responsible for more coral loss during this period than either bleaching or disease despite two mass bleaching events and an increase in the incidence of coral disease. While the limited data for the GBR prior to the 1980's suggests that coral cover was higher than in our survey, we found no evidence of consistent, system-wide decline in coral cover since 1995. Instead, fluctuations in coral cover at subregional scales (10–100 km), driven mostly by changes in fast-growing Acroporidae, occurred as a result of localized disturbance events and subsequent recovery

First narrow-band search for continuous gravitational waves from known pulsars in advanced detector data

Spinning neutron stars asymmetric with respect to their rotation axis are potential sources of continuous gravitational waves for ground-based interferometric detectors. In the case of known pulsars a fully coherent search, based on matched filtering, which uses the position and rotational parameters obtained from electromagnetic observations, can be carried out. Matched filtering maximizes the signalto- noise (SNR) ratio, but a large sensitivity loss is expected in case of even a very small mismatch between the assumed and the true signal parameters. For this reason, narrow-band analysis methods have been developed, allowing a fully coherent search for gravitational waves from known pulsars over a fraction of a hertz and several spin-down values. In this paper we describe a narrow-band search of 11 pulsars using data from Advanced LIGO’s first observing run. Although we have found several initial outliers, further studies show no significant evidence for the presence of a gravitational wave signal. Finally, we have placed upper limits on the signal strain amplitude lower than the spin-down limit for 5 of the 11 targets over the bands searched; in the case of J1813-1749 the spin-down limit has been beaten for the first time. For an additional 3 targets, the median upper limit across the search bands is below the spin-down limit. This is the most sensitive narrow-band search for continuous gravitational waves carried out so far

Search for post-merger gravitational waves from the remnant of the binary neutron star merger GW170817

In Advanced LIGO, detection and astrophysical source parameter estimation of the binary black hole merger GW150914 requires a calibrated estimate of the gravitational-wave strain sensed by the detectors. Producing an estimate from each detector's differential arm length control loop readout signals requires applying time domain filters, which are designed from a frequency domain model of the detector's gravitational-wave response. The gravitational-wave response model is determined by the detector's opto-mechanical response and the properties of its feedback control system. The measurements used to validate the model and characterize its uncertainty are derived primarily from a dedicated photon radiation pressure actuator, with cross-checks provided by optical and radio frequency references. We describe how the gravitational-wave readout signal is calibrated into equivalent gravitational-wave-induced strain and how the statistical uncertainties and systematic errors are assessed. Detector data collected over 38 calendar days, from September 12 to October 20, 2015, contain the event GW150914 and approximately 16 of coincident data used to estimate the event false alarm probability. The calibration uncertainty is less than 10% in magnitude and 10 degrees in phase across the relevant frequency band 20 Hz to 1 kHz

First measurement of the Hubble Constant from a Dark Standard Siren using the Dark Energy Survey Galaxies and the LIGO/Virgo Binary–Black-hole Merger GW170814

International audienceWe present a multi-messenger measurement of the Hubble constant H 0 using the binary–black-hole merger GW170814 as a standard siren, combined with a photometric redshift catalog from the Dark Energy Survey (DES). The luminosity distance is obtained from the gravitational wave signal detected by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO)/Virgo Collaboration (LVC) on 2017 August 14, and the redshift information is provided by the DES Year 3 data. Black hole mergers such as GW170814 are expected to lack bright electromagnetic emission to uniquely identify their host galaxies and build an object-by-object Hubble diagram. However, they are suitable for a statistical measurement, provided that a galaxy catalog of adequate depth and redshift completion is available. Here we present the first Hubble parameter measurement using a black hole merger. Our analysis results in , which is consistent with both SN Ia and cosmic microwave background measurements of the Hubble constant. The quoted 68% credible region comprises 60% of the uniform prior range [20, 140] km s−1 Mpc−1, and it depends on the assumed prior range. If we take a broader prior of [10, 220] km s−1 Mpc−1, we find (57% of the prior range). Although a weak constraint on the Hubble constant from a single event is expected using the dark siren method, a multifold increase in the LVC event rate is anticipated in the coming years and combinations of many sirens will lead to improved constraints on H 0