Institutional reforms in developing countries often involve copying institutions from developed countries. Such institutional copying is likely to fail, if formal institutions alone are copied without the informal institutions on which they rest in the originating country. This paper...

Despite positive but mixed progress over two decades, most lower income African countries need to enhance their low tax-to-GDP ratios by mobilizing domestic resources to complement debt relief, donor aid and to achieve the MDG and poverty reduction objectives. With these goals in mind, most...

Modern tax administrations seek to optimize tax collections while minimizing administration costs and taxpayer compliance costs. Experience shows that voluntary compliance is best achieved through a system of self-assessment. Many tax administrations have introduced self-assessment principles in...

This paper carefully investigates some of the existing hypothesis regarding the transmission of different colonial legacies to modern day economic performance in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). It focuses on four key channels of transmission namely, human capital, trade openness, market distortion and...

Based on case studies of education systems and practices in eight English-speaking African countries, the publication closely examines issues of teacher supply, deployment, management and finance. The book suggests that these issues are closely interrelated. Low numbers of qualified teaching...

Recent studies on African economic history have emphasized the structural impediments to African growth, such as adverse geographical conditions and extractive colonial institutions. The evidence is mainly drawn from cross-country regressions on late 20th century income levels, assuming...

All the countries in Anglophone Africa share a common history of British colonialism. Many of the administrative practices and laws are similar. There must have been a model set of legal clauses for property tax produced in Whitehall for the colonial administration to use and adapt to local...

Anglophone African countries have been implementing reform and modernization initiatives in their Customs administrations. This paper outlines the progression of key reform and modernization initiatives in these countries since the early 1990s, and assesses the gap between these reforms and...

The paper uses a unique database covering 44 countries in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) countries between 2000 and 2007 to study the determinants of the allocation and composition of flows across countries, as well as channels through which private capital flows could affect growth. In our sample,...

The paper uses a unique database covering 44 countries in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) countries between 2000 and 2007 to study the determinants of the allocation and composition of flows across countries, as well as channels through which private capital flows could affect growth. In our sample,...