Rose Camille Vincent will present the paper This paper investigates the role of deep historical elements in shaping intergovernmental tax arrangements as an alternative to the various modern-day features suggested by economic theories. We connect historical elements and key explanatory factors embedded in ethno-cultural diversity and geography to new indicators measuring the taxing rights of sub-national governments in many countries. We estimate the effects of economically relevant and historical institutional variables on the current design of the multi-layer tax structure across more than 70 countries in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. The results confirm the relevance of the historical variables. Sub-national governments in countries with a higher degree of pre-colonial state centralization tend to have greater discretionary power over tax matters today. The path out of colonization also matters: countries that have experienced a violent independence movement tend to have a more centralized tax structure. Contrary to the conventional view, ethno-cultural diversity falls short in explaining multi-layer tax arrangements. However, the standard economic theories are not all irrelevant: country size and terrain ruggedness tend to imply greater decentralization of tax-related decisions. The results are robust to an extensive set of control variables and a range of IV-GMM estimations using ecological diversity, the Tsetse suitability index, and Neolithic transition timing as instrumental variables for pre-colonial centralization.
Postdoctoral Researcher, ETH Zürich
Dr Rose Camille Vincent is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Chair of Public Economics of ETH Zürich. Her research focuses primarily on the political-economic and behavioural implications of institutional arrangements regarding taxation and tax policies. She is also invested in collecting and compiling unique datasets using administrative records and archives that define the structure of public sector institutions, especially in developing and emerging economies.
Dr Vincent has a proven track record of successful collaboration with research and policy institutions on projects related to public finance and development. She has worked for/consulted the OECD, the World Bank Group, the GIZ, the Inter-American Development Bank, the WHO, the UNU-WIDER, the International Centre for Tax and Development (IDS/ICTD), the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW-Berlin), among others. Since 2017, she has been an academic contributor to the World Observatory on Subnational Finance and Investment and has collaborated on the creation of novel databases on sub-national finance (see for e.g. the database on Regional Government Finance and Investment – REGOFI).
