IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/idq/ictduk/14430.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Expensive to be a Female Trader: The Reality of Taxation of Flea Market Traders in Zimbabwe

Author

Listed:
  • Ligomeka, Waziona

Abstract

Interest is growing in taxing small-scale traders in developing countries in both the academic literature and the policy arena. This interest is due to the large and often growing portion of small-scale businesses in many developing economies, which is eroding their formal tax bases. Zimbabwe is slowly, but increasingly taxing this sector. In 2005 the country introduced a simplified tax regime targeting small-scale businesses, requiring them to pay a presumptive tax instead of the standard corporate tax. Initially, only a limited number of business types were subject to the presumptive tax. However, in 2011 additional small-scale business types were included in the regime. The interest to tax the small-scale sector emanates from the gradual but significant increase in the number of small-scale traders and the reduction in formal tax revenue as a result of a decline in economic activities. As a percentage of its total economy, Zimbabwe has the second largest informal sector in the world, with 60.6% of its economy engaged in small-scale business. However, as the drive to tax more small-scale businesses is increasing in Zimbabwe, the reality of taxing this sector is unclear. Accordingly, this study aims to answer the following questions: 1. What kind of taxes do flea market traders pay in Zimbabwe? 2. What proportion of a flea market trader’s income is paid in taxes? 3. Is there gender disparity in the taxation of flea market traders?

Suggested Citation

  • Ligomeka, Waziona, 2019. "Expensive to be a Female Trader: The Reality of Taxation of Flea Market Traders in Zimbabwe," Working Papers 14430, Institute of Development Studies, International Centre for Tax and Development.
    • Handle: RePEc:idq:ictduk:14430
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://opendocs.ids.ac.uk/opendocs/handle/20.500.12413/14430
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. Komatsu,Hitomi & Ambel,Alemayehu A. & Koolwal,Gayatri B. & Yonis,Manex Bule, 2021. "Gender and Tax Incidence of Rural Land Use Fee and Agricultural Income Tax in Ethiopia," Policy Research Working Paper Series 9715, The World Bank.
    2. Mpofu Favourate Y Sebele, 2021. "Informal Sector Taxation and Enforcement in African Countries: How plausible and achievable are the motives behind? A Critical Literature Review," Open Economics, De Gruyter, vol. 4(1), pages 72-97, January.
    3. repec:thr:techub:10019:y:2021:i:1:p:607-630 is not listed on IDEAS
    4. Akpan, Imaobong & Cascant-Sempere, Ma Josep, 2022. "Do Tax Policies Discriminate Against Female Traders? A Gender Framework to Study Informal Marketplaces in Nigeria," Working Papers 17624, Institute of Development Studies, International Centre for Tax and Development.
    5. Komatsu, Hitomi & Ambel, Alemayehu A. & Koolwal, Gayatri & Yonis, Manex Bule, 2022. "Gender norms, landholdership, and rural land use fee and agricultural income tax in Ethiopia," Land Use Policy, Elsevier, vol. 121(C).
    6. Jade Siu, 2020. "Formalising informal cross-border trade: Evidence from One-Stop-Border-Posts in Uganda," Discussion Papers 20-08, Department of Economics, University of Birmingham.
    7. Gwaindepi, Abel, 2019. "Domestic revenue mobilization in Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America: A comparative analysis since 1980," Lund Papers in Economic History 209, Lund University, Department of Economic History.
    8. Favourate Y Mpofu, 2021. "Addressing the Saturation Attainment Controversy: Evidence from the Qualitative Research on Assessing the Feasibility of Informal Sector Taxation in Zimbabwe," Technium Social Sciences Journal, Technium Science, vol. 19(1), pages 607-630, May.
    9. Abel Gwaindepi, 2021. "Domestic revenue mobilisation in developing countries: An exploratory analysis of sub‐Saharan Africa and Latin America," Journal of International Development, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 33(2), pages 396-421, March.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Finance; Governance;

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    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:14430. 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.