Tax me, but spend wisely? Sources of public finance and government accountability
By Lucie Gadenne. 2015
147 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Existing evidence suggests that extra grant revenues lead to little improvements in public services in developing countries - but would governments spend tax revenues differently? This paper considers a program that invests in the tax capacity of Brazilian municipalities. Using variations in the timing of program uptake I find that it raises local tax revenues and that the increase in taxes is used to improve both the quantity and quality of municipal education infrastructure. In contrast increases in grants over which municipalities have the same discretion as over taxes have no impact on any measure of local public infrastructure. These results suggest that the way governments are financed matters: governments spend increases in tax revenues more towards expenditures that benefit citizens than increases in grant revenues.
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Political Science and International Relations
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2130979ec1b95341775847714d447aac0770d493
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Citations in the corpus
- No Taxation Without Information: Deterrence and Self-Enforcement in the Value Added Tax (2015, unknown): “Treatment firms are included until four months after treatment (the time during which the effect of the deterrence letter is the strongest), which is February 2009 for the first wave and June 2009 for the second, and control firms are included until June 2009.(32) Since some preannouncements were de”
- Social protection response to the COVID-19 crisis: options for developing countries (2020, background): “They may also be more easily held accountable to communities and may feel pressure to be more responsive, provided the resources and functions devolved to them are clearly communicated to the public (Gadenne, 2017; Martinez, 2018).”
- From the Lab to the Field: A Review of Tax Experiments (2016, unknown): “Other studies have focused on the relation between taxpaying and public accountability using experimental or quasi-experimental methods, such as Paler (2013), Martin (2014) and Gadenne (2017).”
- The Participation Dividend of Taxation: How Citizens in Congo Engage More with the State When it Tries to Tax Them* (2020, background): “…(2004); Robinson, Torvik, and Verdier (2006); Dunning (2008); Ramsay (2011); Caselli and Michaels (2013); Brollo et al. (2013); McGuirk (2013); Ferraz and Monteiro (2014); Borge, Parmer, and Torvik (2015); Timmons and Garfias (2015); Chen and Kung (2016); Gadenne (2017); and Martinez (2019).”