Dr Lucie Gadenne

Can consumption taxes reduce inequality in developing countries?

This brief addresses the fiscal response to the coronavirus pandemic, arguing that governments could make use of the opportunities this shock provides to make changes to tax systems now that might be politically difficult later.

Do tax systems distort firm-to-firm trade? Using data from both firms that do and don’t pay VAT in West Bengal in India, this paper shows that they can have significant effects, contributing to highly segmented supply chain networks.

Ration shop systems allow households to purchase limited quantities of some commodities at a fixed subsidized price and are in widespread use throughout the developing world. I construct a model of piece-wise increasing commodity taxation to consider whether the use of ration shops can be rationalized by the characteristics of developing countries: limited government capacity to observe household incomes and high commodity price risk.

This note summarises ongoing work being undertaken by Lucie Gadenne, Tushar Nandi and Roland Rathelot on the scale and nature of supply chain distortions in West Bengal. Earlier work examined the effects of reforms to West Bengal’s simplified tax schemes on revenues.

This briefing note presents preliminary results from a study on value added tax (VAT) and tax compliance in the Indian state of West Bengal.

The first component of the centre’s work involves partnering with the Governments of Ghana and Ethiopia to co-produce modelling tools and analyses of the key tax and benefit policy and administration issues that these countries face.

Existing evidence suggests that extra grant revenues lead to little improvements in public services in developing countries - but would governments spend tax revenues differently? This paper considers a program that invests in the tax capacity of Brazilian municipalities.