PhD defense: Kodjo Adandohoin

Quatre essais sur la transition fiscale dans les pays en développement

Jury

Jean-François Brun, Associate Professor-HDR, Université Clermont Auvergne
Christopher Adam, Professor, St. Cross College
Lisa Chauvet, Professor, Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne
Jean-Louis Combes, Professor, Université Clermont Auvergne
Ousmane Samba-Mamadou, Executive Director, COFEB

Abstract

During recent years, most developing countries have been faced with the need to reconcile two imperatives: on the one hand, a strong social demand that requires additional public resources, and on the other, tariff dismantling following trade opening policies, which deprives them from their major budgetary revenues. Hence, it urges for these countries to ensure a transition in the structure of their public revenues, i.e. to transfer the fiscal pressure from international trade to domestic taxation. This thesis focuses on this issue and aims to study the conditions for succeeding such transition through four empirical essays.

The first essay concerns the role of value-added tax (VAT) and excise duties in a first wave of transition. Since VAT is a neutral tax with a very broad tax base, it has been suggested to countries as a major tool for successfully transferring public resources from border taxes to domestic taxation, and to complement the VAT effect with excise duties taxation. Our empirical investigations support this theoretical assertion and show that the pair VAT-excise does play a meaningful role as a substitute for border taxes, which have almost decreased following tariffs dismantling in developing countries. Nevertheless, the supporting role of VAT and excise duties is limited above a certain threshold of decline in border taxes, which also reflects the fact that the potential for tax revenue mobilization by VAT and excises is limited in these countries and deserves close attention.

In the second essay, we analyze the second generation tax transition scheme based on direct taxes (incomes and property taxes). We find that direct taxes are not operational for tax transition in developing countries. However, we find that financial development is an undeniable mediator for a successful second wave tax transition reform based on direct taxes. Financial development would allow to recoup informations on taxpayers’ incomes and produce paper trails for tax administrations. This would help enforce incomes taxes and secure additional direct tax revenues in this transition process.

In the third essay, we examine the effect of the implementation of a tax transition reform on the efficiency of revenue collection by conducting a case study for the West African Economic and Monetary Union (WAEMU). Our results support the affirmative, in the sense that the reform increases overall revenue collection efficiency in the WAEMU zone. This efficiency would also lead to an improvement in tax-oriented business climate in the zone, following the implementation
of the reform.

Finally, we conclude this thesis with a last essay that examines the distributional and poverty impacts of VAT-based tax transition reform for the case of Togo. Although the results show a regressive impact of the reform on households’ income, a redistribution through spending would have the merit of mitigating the social incidence of the reform on households’ income at this country level.

Keywords

Tax transition, VAT, Excise, Developing countries, ,Trade taxes, Income tax, Corporate tax, Property tax, Taxation, Tax potential, Tax effort, Exemptions, Tax administration, Tax coordination, Harmonization, Business climate, Poverty, Inequality, Tax reform, Financial development, Internet, Stochastic frontier analysis, Efficiency, Synthetic control, Propensity scores, 2SLS-IV model, GMM, Probit and Logit, Computable general equilibrium, Micro-simulation.

theses.fr/en/s190490