The Politics of Revenue Bargaining

Two recent developments make researching revenue bargaining in low-income countries increasingly timely. First, many countries have experienced sustained economic growth over the last two decades, and although absolute flows of Overseas Development Assistance (ODA) have continued to grow, aid now constitutes a smaller proportion of GDP relative to domestic revenues and revenues from Foreign Direct Investments (OECD 2014). Value added tax (VAT), income and corporate taxes constitute increasing proportions of domestically collected revenue in many countries. In addition, grants and loans from non-OECD DAC (Development Assistance Committee) donors, such as China, and revenues from natural resources are more recent, and partially untapped revenue sources (Keen & Mansour 2010). All of these developments have served to politicize revenue collection, where taxpayer groups increasingly engage in revenue bargaining with their governments and make demands in return for their contributions. This raises the question, pertinent to this workshop, of how such new and more targeted demands around revenue bargains will affect policy outcomes. Second, revenue bargaining has received renewed interest in the political science literature. The renewed focus has been driven both by revisiting the history of European state-building (Timmons 2005; Boucoyannis 2015) and by exploring how the traditionally low levels of domestic tax collection contribute to development outcomes in the Global South (Moore 2008; Prichard 2010). In this literature, revenue bargaining processes between revenue providers and governments are assumed to influence policy outcomes, such as better governance or better public services (Levi 1988; Tilly 1992; Moore 2008). Yet, the potential policy outcomes of revenue bargaining are not well specified or documented (Boucoyannis 2015: 306). The second purpose of this workshop is thus to explore how the scholarship on tax bargains in the developing world may be improved by the development of testable hypothesis linking the interests of revenue providers to public policy outcomes. This workshop invites participants who actively research the politics of tax and revenue bargaining in low income countries across the world. We seek theoretical and empirical contributions in the field of the political economy of tax and revenue. The workshop invites all scholars who work within the themes of revenues, state-building and public goods provision in the developing world.