Fiscal Capacity and the Quality of Government in Sub-Saharan Africa

Thushyanthan Baskaran and Arne Bigsten ()

World Development, 2013, vol. 45, issue C, 92-107

Abstract: Historical evidence from the industrialized world suggests that the expansion of the modern state’s capacity to tax eventually led to more democratic and less corrupt governments. Using a dataset that covers 31 sub-Saharan African countries over the 1990–2005 period, we study whether the positive effect of fiscal capacity on the quality of government prevails in contemporaneous sub-Saharan Africa as well. The results provide consistent evidence that within sub-Saharan Africa, fiscal capacity decreases corruption and increases democracy.

Keywords: fiscal capacity; taxation; quality of government; sub-Saharan Africa (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (28)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X12002343
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:wdevel:v:45:y:2013:i:c:p:92-107

DOI: 10.1016/j.worlddev.2012.09.018

Access Statistics for this article

World Development is currently edited by O. T. Coomes

More articles in World Development from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().