Lessons from tax reform : an overview

The World Bank's tax reform project is an attempt to document and analyze the experience with tax reform in ten developing countries. The purpose of this project has been to try and obtain a better appreciation of how developing countries may improve the performance of their tax systems. Towards this end, each country study has delved into the questions of what motivated these tax reforms, what they were intended to accomplish, how they were implemented and how successful they have been in achieving their objectives. This paper attempts to discern empirical regularities to see whether there are some general lessons that can be extracted from a comparison of the experience with tax reform in different countries. The countries encompassed by this project are Turkey, Indonesia, Korea, Bolivia, Colombia, Mexico, Jamaica, Morocco, Malawi and Zimbabwe.