Understanding Taxation in Poor African Countries: A Critical Review of Selected Perspectives

The purpose of this article is to provide a critical review of some recent, comparative and longitudinal studies of various aspects of tax—aid—democracy linkages in poor aid-dependent African countries. Each study represents various perspectives on this, namely the importance of economic structure; of regime type and incentives; of political institutions; and of the political economy of aid. The main features and problems of each approach are highlighted, and five issues central to a better understanding of tax—aid—democracy linkages are identified: the extent of informalisation of the economy structure (not just the sectoral composition of GDP); the reciprocity between taxation and service provision (the importance of which may be overrated in current literature on taxation); the composition and conditionality of aid (not just its relative size); and the extent of coercion and conflict in taxation (especially in local government taxation, which affect many more citizens than central government taxation does).