Public revenue mobilisation for inclusive development

How can tax policies be used to increase economic growth and spur job creation? Working closely with the South African Revenue Service (SARS), researchers and policy practitioners explore the links between tax policy and economic growth. The work stream covers topics such as tax policy design and tax administration design, how COVID-19 impacted revenue collection, and how procurement procedures impact prices, quality, and corruption in public expenditure across the region.

In addition to the studies commissioned for this work stream, a primary goal will be to build the capacity to manage and use the tax administrative data which sits at the National Treasury and SARS. This work stream also invests in the future researchers and policymakers of the Southern African region by co-organizing a training in South Africa with UNU-WIDER’s Domestic Revenue Mobilization (DRM) programme. The UNU-WIDER Winter School on tax policy research provides early-career researchers in developing countries with a toolkit in applied public economics, with a special focus on the quantitative analysis of tax and public economics in developing countries.

Working paper
Ada Jansen, Winile Ngobeni, Alexius Sithole, and Wynnon Steyn
A key objective of many governments is to improve tax revenue mobilization. One way to achieve this is by improving tax compliance. This requires accurate knowledge of the tax gap, i.e. the difference between what...
April 2020
Public revenue
Working paper
Isaac Marcelin, Daniel Brink, David Oluwatosin Fadiran, and Hammed Adedeji Amusa
Employing the difference-in-differences technique, this study examines the impact of the Employment Tax Incentive programme on a large sample of South African firms from 2011 to 2016. It finds that programme firms expanded investments by...
July 2019
Public revenue
Working paper
by Amina Ebrahim and Jukka Pirttilä
The paper examines the incidence and employment impacts of the Employment Tax Incentive, a South African wage subsidy system that is targeted at the employers of low-wage youth. The paper uses a triple differences strategy...
March, 2019
Public revenue
Working paper
by Rebone Gcabo, Boitumelo Moche, Wynnona Steyn, Boikhutso Moahlodi, Jukka Pirttilä, Michael Noble, Gemma Wright, Helen Barnes, and Faith Masekesa
Using SAMOD, a tax-benefit model for South Africa, the paper examines the joint distributional impacts of the increase in the VAT rate and increases in benefit amounts that took place in 2018. The results demonstrate...
March, 2019
Public revenue
Working paper
by Seppo Kari, Londiwe Khoza, Nagamso Manjezi, and Kyle McNabb
The problem of debt bias can be tackled through either disincentivizing the use of debt financing or incentivizing the use of equity financing. Considering the South African context—in which many firms are highly leveraged and...
March 2019
Public revenue
Working paper
by Amina Ebrahim, Rebone Gcabo, Lilian Khumalo, and Jukka Pirttilä
This framing paper has two main purposes. We first provide a brief survey of the economic literature on taxation in South Africa. Second, we attempt to offer some ideas about areas and topics on which...
March, 2019
Public revenue
Events
15 Nov 2018 / 08:15 to 13:15
Public revenue
Under the SA-TIED programme qualified researchers have access to highly granular administrative tax datasets derived from South African Revenue Services’ data to answer important questions about tax policy and inequality in South Africa. SA-TIED is...
News
UNU-WIDER launched its newest programme ‘Southern Africa – Towards Inclusive Economic Development (SA-TIED)’ on 30 November 2017 in Pretoria, South Africa. Together with the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and a number of South...
11 December 2017
Enterprise development
Public revenue
Labour market and inequality
Macro-fiscal analysis
Climate and energy
Reform implementation
Phase 1 regional growth