Tax evasion and widening the tax base in Uganda

Edward B. Sennoga, John Mary Matovu and Evarist P. Twimukye

No 54802, Research Series from Economic Policy Research Centre (EPRC)

Abstract: Uganda still lags behind in its tax collections at the domestic level. For most of the commodities the tax collection effort is not more than 5 percent relative to the statutory rate of 18 percent. This results into a situation where the government has to rely a lot on foreign financing. From the analysis, there is a lot of improvement where URA can be able to increase its tax effort. this could be achieved by targeting commodities that are under-taxed and excluding food items for equity purposes. Increasing domestic collection would also result into less over reliance on taxing a few commodities especially fuel which is interlinked with a lot of other sectors and could indeed harm growth in the long-run. We also find that the tax effort on imports is sufficient. However, import duties on fuel remain very high and this could be a symptom of the poor domestic tax collection.

Keywords: Agribusiness; Agricultural and Food Policy; Community/Rural/Urban Development; Consumer/Household Economics; Crop Production/Industries; Demand and Price Analysis; Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety; Food Security and Poverty; Public Economics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 32
Date: 2009-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-afr, nep-dev, nep-pbe and nep-pub
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ags:eprcrs:54802

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.54802

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