IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/idq/ictduk/13721.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Political Economy of Property Tax in Africa: Explaining Reform Outcomes in Sierra Leone

Author

Listed:
  • Jibao, Samuel S.
  • Prichard, Wilson

Abstract

Effective local government taxation is critical to achieving the governance beneï¬ ts widely attributed to decentralization, but in practice successful tax reform has been rare because of entrenched political resistance. This article offers new insights into the political dynamics of property tax reform through a case study of Sierra Leone, focusing on variation in experiences and outcomes across the country’s four largest city councils. Based on this evidence, the article argues that elite resistance has posed a particularly acute barrier to local government tax reform, but that ethnic diversity has sometimes served to strengthen reform by fragmenting elite resistance. Furthermore, opposition councils have had stronger incentives to strengthen tax collection than councils dominated by the ruling party, in order to increase their ï¬ scal autonomy. More generally, heightened electoral competition can lead to sustained revenue gains by encouraging city councils to adopt a more contractual approach to tax reform that stresses transparency, engagement, and equity.

Suggested Citation

  • Jibao, Samuel S. & Prichard, Wilson, 2015. "The Political Economy of Property Tax in Africa: Explaining Reform Outcomes in Sierra Leone," Working Papers 13721, Institute of Development Studies, International Centre for Tax and Development.
    • Handle: RePEc:idq:ictduk:13721
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://opendocs.ids.ac.uk/opendocs/handle/20.500.12413/13721
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Gabriella Y. Carolini, 2021. "Aid’s urban footprint and its implications for local inequality and governance," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 53(2), pages 389-409, March.
    2. Jibao, Samuel & Prichard, Wilson, 2016. "Rebuilding Local Government Finances After Conflict: Lessons from a Property Tax Reform Programme in Post-Conflict Sierra Leone," Working Papers 13739, Institute of Development Studies, International Centre for Tax and Development.
    3. Vanessa van den Boogaard & Wilson Prichard & Rachel Beach & Fariya Mohiuddin, 2022. "Enabling tax bargaining: Supporting more meaningful tax transparency and taxpayer engagement in Ghana and Sierra Leone," Development Policy Review, Overseas Development Institute, vol. 40(1), January.
    4. Richard M. Bird, 2015. "Fiscal Decentralization and Decentralizing Tax Administration: Different Questions, Different Answers," International Center for Public Policy Working Paper Series, at AYSPS, GSU paper1509, International Center for Public Policy, Andrew Young School of Policy Studies, Georgia State University.
    5. Armin von Schiller, 2017. "Party system institutionalization and reliance on personal income tax: Exploring the relationship using new data," WIDER Working Paper Series 032, World Institute for Development Economic Research (UNU-WIDER).
    6. Sung-Hoon Kang & Bong-Joon Kim, 2022. "Designing a Valuation System for Property Tax: The Case of Zanzibar, Tanzania," Land, MDPI, vol. 11(7), pages 1-12, June.
    7. Nnamani, Obinna Collins & Ifeanacho, Kenechi Peter & Onyekwelu, Ezinne Ifeoma & Ogbuefi, Paul Chibueze, 2023. "Barriers to effective property tax reform in Nigeria: Implementation of the land use charge in Enugu state," Land Use Policy, Elsevier, vol. 126(C).
    8. Flores-Macías, Gustavo A., 2018. "Building support for taxation in developing countries: Experimental evidence from Mexico," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 105(C), pages 13-24.
    9. Jonathan L. Weigel & Elie Kabue Ngindu, 2023. "The taxman cometh: Pathways out of a low‐capacity trap in the Democratic Republic of the Congo," Economica, London School of Economics and Political Science, vol. 90(360), pages 1362-1396, October.
    10. Armin von Schiller, 2017. "Party system institutionalization and reliance on personal income tax: Exploring the relationship using new data," WIDER Working Paper Series wp-2017-32, World Institute for Development Economic Research (UNU-WIDER).
    11. Franklin Obeng†Odoom, 2018. "Transnational Corporations and Urban Development," American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 77(2), pages 447-510, March.
    12. Robert Dibie & Raphael Dibie, 2020. "Analysis of the Determinants of Tax Policy Compliance in Nigeria," Journal of Public Administration and Governance, Macrothink Institute, vol. 10(2), pages 3462-3462, December.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Governance;

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:idq:ictduk:13721. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: CATS administrator (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.ids.ac.uk/project/international-centre-for-tax-and-development .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.