the Institute of Development Studies and partner organisations
Browse

Regulatory Burdens in Tax Administration and Firms’ Compliance Costs in Africa

Download (1.3 MB)
report
posted on 2024-09-06, 07:38 authored by Merima Ali
This paper examines the effect of regulatory burdens related to tax administration on firms’ compliance costs in Africa. Using cross-country firm-level data, the results show that regulatory burdens related to tax administration significantly increase firms’ compliance costs compared to burdens related to other kinds of government regulations. The results further show that firms’ relationships with tax officials affect their compliance costs. While firms that are frequently inspected by tax officials have higher compliance costs, firms that are requested to pay bribes by tax officials, on the other hand, have lower compliance costs. These results, which remain robust after accounting for other firm-, sector- and country-specific factors, highlight that regulatory burdens related to taxation play a bigger role in increasing overall compliance costs in Africa than other forms of regulatory burdens, and that firms may look to informal ways to reduce the burden by paying bribes to tax officials.

Funding

Default funder

History

Publisher

IDS

Citation

Ali, M. (2018) Regulatory Burdens in Tax Administration and Firms’ Compliance Costs in Africa, ICTD Working Paper 78: Brighton

Series

ICTD Working Paper 78

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

IDS Item Types

Series paper (IDS)

Copyright holder

© Institute of Development Studies, 2018

Language

en

IDS team

Governance

Project identifier

Default project::9ce4e4dc-26e9-4d78-96e9-15e4dcac0642::600

Usage metrics

    International Centre for Tax and Development

    Categories

    No categories selected

    Keywords

    Exports

    RefWorks
    BibTeX
    Ref. manager
    Endnote
    DataCite
    NLM
    DC