International development

In a new CSAE working paper, IFS researcher Dr Rachel Cassidy uses a randomised controlled trial to examine the link between intra-household bargaining and use of new contraceptive technologies in Mozambique.

Our study contributes to the understanding of key drivers of stunted growth, a factor widely recognized as major impediment to human capital development.

This report presents a detailed overview of the baseline data collection activities as part of the project "Improving early childhood development in rural Ghana through scalable low-cost community-run play schemes''. The project is collaboration between The Institute for Fiscal Studies (UK), Lively Minds (UK, Ghana) and Innovations for Poverty Action (Ghana), and is funded by the Jacobs Foundation and Global Innovation Fund (GIF).

High quality early childhood care and education (ECCE) are critical to children’s development and their success in adult life. Ghana has shown substantial commitment to improving ECCE, with one of the highest pre-school enrolment rates in Sub Saharan Africa. However despite this, significant barriers to improvements in ECCE remain, especially in rural areas.

Increasing tax revenues is a priority in low-income countries, where governments collect much less revenue as a share of GDP than in middle- or high-income countries - about 15% on average.

This paper, written collaboratively by IFS researchers and policy-makers from Ethiopia and Ghana, has multiple and interlinked objectives: (i) to provide an overview of tax incentives and best practices for their design grounded in economic principles, and assess how these apply to the case studies of Ethiopia and Ghana; and (ii) to understand more broadly the causal impacts of tax incentives on economic outcomes in developing countries by reviewing the relevant methodologies to conduct rigorous quantitative analysis and the existing empirical literature. Finally, we discuss the policy implications and avenues for research given the existing literature on the causal impact of tax incentives.

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.

As in high-income countries, reduced rates of VAT and VAT exemptions (“preferential VAT rates”) are a common feature of indirect tax systems in LMICs. Many of the goods and services that are granted preferential rates – such as foodstuffs and kerosene – seem likely to receive such treatment on the grounds that they provide a means for the government to indirectly target poorer households, for whom such expenditures may take up a large proportion of their total budget.

As in many high income countries, VAT systems in low and middle income countries (LMICs) are often characterised by different tax treatments for different types of goods and services. Often, reduced rates of VAT and exemptions (“preferential rates”) are granted on equity grounds, for goods and services that are thought to take up a greater proportion of the budgets of poorer households. Given typically limited capacity to redistribute through the direct tax and benefit system, it has been suggested by some economists that such rate differentiation might be the best way for governments to transfer resources to poorer households.

This paper, written collaboratively by IFS researchers and policy-makers from Ethiopia and Ghana, has multiple and interlinked objectives: (i) to provide an overview of tax incentives and best practices for their design grounded in economic principles, and assess how these apply to the case studies of Ethiopia and Ghana; and (ii) to understand more broadly the causal impacts of tax incentives on economic outcomes in developing countries by reviewing the relevant methodologies to conduct rigorous quantitative analysis and the existing empirical literature.

Research on savings groups and financial intermediation in Malawi, joint with Professor Marcel Fafchamps, published as a CEPR Working Paper (12715). https://cepr.org/active/publications/discussion_papers/dp.php?dpno=12715

This paper examines how farmers adapt, in the short-run, to extreme heat. Using a production function approach and micro-data from Peruvian households, we find that high temperatures induce farmers to increase the use of inputs, such as land and domestic labor.

This is a pre-analysis plan specifies analysis we plan to perform for the evaluation of PANKH: an intervention in Dhaulpur district, Rajasthan targeting marriage, education, mental health and socio-emotional skills of adolescent girls as well as gender attitudes of girls and their carers.

We present the first comprehensive evidence on the health impacts of the introduction and expansion of a large non-contributory health insurance program in Mexico, the Seguro Popular (SP).

In this report, we focus on understanding the context for the Sanitation Marketing (SanMark) intervention and potential initial impacts, after its gradual development and roll-out to selected treatment areas in the Nigerian states of Ekiti and Enugu.

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