Mobilizing VAT revenues in African countries

Sijbren Cnossen ()

International Tax and Public Finance, 2015, vol. 22, issue 6, 1077-1108

Abstract: Several African countries have to increase their tax revenues to finance human and economic development. General consumption taxes, such as VATs, are the preferred instrument for doing so, because they are less detrimental to growth than income taxes. To enable their use, VAT design has to be improved. Currently, many VATs are so riddled with exemptions and zero rates on domestic goods that they resemble extended excise tax systems, while the standard rate is mainly confined to luxury goods. VAT base broadening would not only increase revenue but also reduce the economic distortions and administrative complexities of most taxes. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media New York 2015

Keywords: Africa; Collection efficiency; Tax effort; VAT; H21; H25 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (17)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s10797-015-9348-1 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
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:kap:itaxpf:v:22:y:2015:i:6:p:1077-1108

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... ce/journal/10797/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10797-015-9348-1

Access Statistics for this article

International Tax and Public Finance is currently edited by Ronald B. Davies and Kimberly Scharf

More articles in International Tax and Public Finance from Springer, International Institute of Public Finance Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().