Exploring Tilly’s Theory: Violent Conflicts and Tax Revenue in Sub-Saharan Africa

Alou Adessé Dama

Working Papers from HAL

Abstract: This article explores the relationship between violent conflicts and tax revenue in Sub-Saharan countries. In a first stage, I estimate the effects of conflicts for 42 countries using panel data analysis. I find that an outbreak of violent conflict leads to an average 1.5 percent loss of tax revenue per capita. The results show that due to the outbreak of violence, government cannot successfully raise revenue, and because the conflict also negatively affects key macroeconomic variables, the tax base shrink and the overall loss is higher. The results also point to an important role of some specificities of Sub-Saharan countries such as ethnic division and natural resource endowment. Drawing on these results, I conduct case study for Central African Republic, Cote d'Ivoire, Congo Republic, Guinea and Guinea Bissau in a second stage using synthetic control method. The results show that the 2002 conflict in Cote d'Ivoire and the 1998 conflict in Guinea-Bissau led to significant drop in tax revenue. The outbreak of conflict did not have significant effects on tax revenue for the remaining three countries.

Keywords: Tax; Internal conflict; Government revenue; Subsaharian Africa (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://uca.hal.science/hal-03401539v1
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://uca.hal.science/hal-03401539v1/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Exploring Tilly’s Theory: Violent Conflicts and Tax Revenue in Sub-Saharan Africa (2021)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:wpaper:hal-03401539

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().