Promoting Female Economic Inclusion for Tax Performance in Sub-Saharan Africa

Towards Efforts to Enhance Tax Revenue Mobilisation in Africa: Exploring Synergies between Industrialisation and ICTs

“…In the light of the above, the intuition for the study is premised on the fact that industrialisation increases avenues for tax revenue mobilization (Asongu et al 2021) and ICT greases the process of industrialisation (Asongu and Odhiambo 2020a). In other words, the industrialisation process is associated with the transformation of commodities from which, added value is apparent and by extension, the whole process engenders opportunities for tax mobilisation on various fronts, inter alia; (i) personal income tax from the people employed in the industrial process; (ii) corporate tax when the industrialisation process is sanctioned with a positive bottom line in terms of profits and (iii) value-added tax (VAT) which is practically associated with the transformation of commodities to higher perceived values.…”

“…While industrialisation drivers such as foreign direct investment (FDI) and trade openness can constrain resource generation due to trade tax loss, offshore tactics, tax holidays/exemptions, the optimism with industrialisation is that it can be a brick for durable growth, shared opportunities, and sustained resource collection (Agbeyegbe et al 2004;Gupta 2007). Indeed, the blessings associated with digital infrastructure are also enormous and key among them is that, in the developing world, ICTs 4 can be (i) a medium for addressing tax non-compliance, (ii) a boost to industrialisation by incentivizing FDI inflow, and (iii) an enabler of innovation and labour market participation (see, Asongu et al 2021;Ofori and Asongu 2021a;Asongu and Nwachukwu 2017). ICT diffusion can also be employed to broaden the tax net particularly regarding goods and services, fight tax-related corruption and complexities associated with analogue based tax systems (Akitoby 2018).…”

Towards efforts to enhance tax revenue mobilisation in Africa: Exploring the interaction between industrialisation and digital infrastructure

“…While industrialisation drivers such as foreign direct investment (FDI) and trade openness can constrain resource generation due to trade tax loss, offshore tactics, tax holidays/exemptions, the optimism with industrialisation is that it can be a brick for durable growth, shared opportunities, and sustained resource collection (Agbeyegbe et al 2004;Gupta 2007). Indeed, the blessings associated with digital infrastructure are also enormous and key among them is that, in the developing world, ICTs 4 can be (i) a medium for addressing tax non-compliance, (ii) a boost to industrialisation by incentivizing FDI inflow, and (iii) an enabler of innovation and labour market participation (see, Asongu et al 2021;Ofori and Asongu 2021a;Asongu and Nwachukwu 2017). ICT diffusion can also be employed to broaden the tax net particularly regarding goods and services, fight tax-related corruption and complexities associated with analogue based tax systems (Akitoby 2018).…”

Political inclusion and democracy in Africa: some empirical evidence

“…This extant literature has largely focused on inter alia: (i) the reduction of the informal sector (Ngouhouo and Njoya, 2020) and more economic prosperity (Duflo 2012;Doepke and Tertilt, 2019;Kabeer, 2020 ) owing to enhanced female political participation and (ii) reduction in child mortality (Hosain, 2015), reduction of corruption (Jha and Sarangi, 2018;Barnes and Beaulieu, 2019;DiRienzo and Das, 2019;Ngouhouo and Njoya, 2020), human capital consolidation (Hornset and de Soysa, 2021) and enhancement of entrepreneurial opportunities (Al-Dajani and Marlow, 2013;Goltz et al, 2015) owing to increased participation of women. Moreover, there is also another strand of studies positing that the inclusion of women, especially in the formal economic sector engenders favourable macroeconomic outcomes in terms of economic growth and development (Choudhry and Elhorst, 2018;Jemiluyi and Yinusa, 2021), financial inclusion (Balasubramanian and Kuppusamy, 2020) and tax performance (Asongu et al, 2021).…”

“…In terms of conceptual underpinnings, political inclusion is likely to promote democracy, not least, because political inclusion is understood within the remits of, inter alia, (i) civil liberties, (ii) involvement of women in business and society and (iii) the political representativeness of women in organs of decision-making (Sundström et al, 2017). As argued by Asongu et al (2021), political inclusion of women entails a process by which the benefits of women are increased in terms of their ability to have an influence on ideals of politics, participate in civil society organisation and exercise their freedoms. While these underlying benefits are characteristics of democracy, there is an attendant debate that the substantive representation of women is not necessarily linked to more favourable macroeconomic and institutional outcomes Weldon 2010, 2011;Kodila-Tedika and Asongu, 2017).…”