Revenue Mobilisation in Sub-Saharan Africa: Challenges from Globalisation I ‐ Trade Reform

This is the first of two articles evaluating the nature and extent of, and possible responses to, two of the central challenges that globalisation poses for revenue mobilisation in sub-Saharan Africa: trade liberalisation, and corporate tax competition. Both articles use a new dataset with the features needed to address these issues meaningfully: a disentangling of tariff from commodity tax revenue, and a distinction between resource-related and other revenues. This first article describes that dataset, and provides a broad picture of revenue developments in the region between 1980 and 2005. Countries’ experiences have varied, but the overall picture is of non-resource revenues having been essentially stagnant. Within this, however, and with exceptions, reductions in trade tax revenue have been largely offset by increased revenue from domestic sources.