The Government, the Tax Evader: Rethinking “Easy-” and “Hard-To-Collect” Taxes in the Global South

Why do many developing countries struggle to collect taxes effectively? Collecting revenue from public entities and withholding the taxes of civil servants at the source is generally seen as an easy task compared to getting to the “hard-to-tax”, and as something even weaker states are generally capable of. I challenge these categories by showing that it is effectively grounded in problematic assumptions about how states, work, especially what I call horizontally fragmented ones. Previous research suggests that dedicated departments within the tax administration may help but I argue that this ignores the deeper political roots of the phenomenon: a reluctance to enforce fiscal rules that would challenge powerful statal and parastatal actors and contradict a still-powerful moral economy of public sector entitlement. These findings contribute to debates on authoritarian governance, fiscal capacity, and the informal institutions that shape intra-state relations, showing how regime survival strategies can hollow out formal rule enforcement even within the heart of the state apparatus. They suggest that scholars, experts, and practitioners may considerably underestimate the challenges associated with taxing the public sector.