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Does Collecting Taxes Erode the Accountability of Informal Leaders? Evidence from the DRC

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posted on 2024-09-05, 21:42 authored by Augustin Bergeron, Elie Kabue Ngindu, Gabriel Tourek, Jonathan L. Weigel
Delegating tax collection to informal leaders could raise tax revenue but runs the risk of undermining the local accountability of those leaders. We investigate this trade-off by exploiting whether city chiefs in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) were randomly assigned to collect property taxes in 2018. To measure accountability, we study the other side of the social contract: the distribution of resources by chiefs in a government cash transfer programme in which they had discretion over the recipients of development aid. In line with the preferences of citizens, chiefs who collected taxes allocated more programme benefits to poorer households and thus made fewer inclusion and exclusion errors. They were no more or less likely to pocket benefits themselves or allocate them to their families. Across a range of measures, citizens appear to have updated their beliefs of chiefs who collected taxes. We provide evidence that collector chiefs allocated aid to poorer households because door-to-door tax collection created opportunities to learn which households were in greatest need. In contrast to concerns of ‘decentralised despotism,’ the paper thus finds evidence of a chief’s accountability benefiting from delegating tax responsibilities to local leaders in low-capacity states.

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Institute of Development Studies

Citation

Bergeron, A.; Kabue Ngindu, E.; Tourek, G. and L. Weigel, J. (2024) 'Does Collecting Taxes Erode the Accountability of Informal Leaders? Evidence from the DRC', ICTD Working Paper 193

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ICTD Working Paper 193

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  • VoR (Version of Record)

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© Institute of Development Studies 2024

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Democratic Republic of the Congo

Language

en

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International Centre for Tax and Development (ICTD)::3b220a8a-8703-4b31-ae24-8e7b0c5f7583::600

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