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Correct registration for the value-added tax (VAT) is a key aspect of tax compliance; it is vital in ensuring adequate tax revenue collection in all countries but particularly in developing countries such as South Africa. Non-registration hinders sufficient tax revenue collection, stifles economic growth and causes unfair competition with formal businesses. The purpose of this study is to determine whether changes in the VAT rate affect the registration decisions of businesses, ultimately impacting upon tax compliance behaviour and tax revenue collection.

An online 2 × 2 between-subjects field experiment was conducted, as part of a broader study, to consider compliance with registration requirements by small business entities in South Africa, specifically when there are changes in the VAT rate.

Although the study establishes that changes in the VAT rate tend not to have a significant impact on the registration decisions of such taxpayers, it nonetheless indicates that the magnitude of the change in the VAT rate may be influential on registration decisions, whether relating to compulsory or voluntary registration. More particularly, the greater the magnitude of the VAT rate decrease (increase), the more likely it is that taxpayers will register (deregister) for VAT purposes, indicating that the magnitude of changes in the VAT rate do have an impact on VAT registration decisions and therefore on tax compliance more generally.

Not only does the study add to the limited knowledge available on registration decisions of small businesses, but also gives valuable guidance to policymakers in terms of determining the VAT rate for the country.

Not only does the study add to the limited knowledge available on registration decisions of small businesses, but it also gives valuable guidance to policymakers in terms of determining the VAT rate for the country.

This paper aims to examine the relationship between registration of business and tax payment among micro-business owners in Nkoranza South Municipal and Nkoranza North District in Ghana.

Interview schedule was used to collect information from 720 micro business owners who qualify for tax stamps. The study used correspondence analysis as the analytical tool.

The study found a significant association between registration of business and tax payment. The biplot also indicated that unregistered businesses and businesses registered with District Assembly only are more likely to evade tax than those registered with Ghana Revenue Authority.

In Ghana, for instance, owner of business is required by law to provide information on his/her business, himself/herself and partners (as the case may be) to the Registrar-General Department, and thereafter, the business should also be registered at the nearest Ghana Revenue Authority District Office. This regulation was enacted in 2005, and it is expected that this registration will help tax authority in tax collection, as they will have adequate knowledge about businesses in the area including the location of the businesses. However, after 10 years in existence of this regulation, the effect of this registration requirement on tax payment in Ghana is not known. It is this gap that the present study seeks to fill by looking at the relationship between registration of business and tax evasion in the Ghanaian informal sector.

This paper aims to investigate the correlates of tax registration among self-employed in Upper Denkyira East municipal and Upper Denkyira West district in Ghana.

In all, 783 self-employed were interviewed and discriminant analysis was used to examine the factors that influence a self-employed person’s decision to register with Ghana Revenue Authority.

The study found that, age of the self-employed, number of times tax officers visit and inspect self-employed, experience in business, number of years of schooling, distance to tax office and estimated annual profit are important discriminants of tax registration compliance.

Tax registration is the fundamental element of tax compliance since any effort to exact compliance from taxpayers begins with registration with the tax authority. However, previous studies in the Ghanaian informal sector such as Baba (2010), Baba and Asante (2012) and Razak and Adafula (2013) have focused mainly on aggregate tax compliance (registration, filing, reporting and payment combined) without given specific attention to this fundamental component of tax compliance risk. Therefore, this study seeks to address the gap in the literature.

This study aims to investigate the factors that affect the likelihood of formalizing informal sector activities in 13 Sub-Saharan African countries, using World Bank enterprise survey data collected between the periods 2009 and 2018. Notwithstanding the great contribution of the informal economy in Africa, developing countries may stand to gain more if they make inroads in formalizing the informal sector.

Since the dependent variable is binary taking the value of one if the firm is willing to formalize and zero otherwise, the study will employ a discrete choice probit model.

Results inter alia show that firms that are more likely to formalize are young, owned by individuals with high levels of education and, have registered before. Governments should therefore target firms that are young and provide them with information about the benefits of registration, and if these firms are owned by experienced and educated individuals, the likelihood for them to register would be high.

The study uses cross sectional data and therefore cannot capture time variant factors affecting the probability to register and also cannot correct effectively for endogeneity.

Governments should therefore target firms that are young and provide them with as much information as possible about the benefits of registration, and if these firms are owned by experienced and educated individuals, the likelihood to convince them to register would be high. They should also reduce the cost of registration so as to improve net benefits in line with the rational exit view.

Formalizing informal activities will help improve the performance of these firms, reduce vulnerable employment as well as crime, poverty and inequality. Providing decent operating and working conditions to informal players will reduce social and political unrest.

The African continent is home to many informal firms accounting for roughly 55% of economic activity with 90% of workers eking out a living in a sector that does not respect worker rights, provide decent working conditions and where changes in growth have done little to reduce its size. Regulatory reforms have also been implemented resulting in the number of start-up registration procedures falling from 11 in 2003 to seven in 2019. The uniqueness of Sub Saharan Africa in terms of entrepreneurial culture, political, institutional and economic conditions as well as lack of consensus in the extant empirical literature make this study pertinent.

Informal entrepreneurship is seen as a direct outcome of either the failure of formal institutions or the asymmetry between formal and informal institutions. These two viewpoints are so far debated as alternative theoretical explanations for the prevalence of informal entrepreneurship. In this paper, the authors offer a theoretically integrative approach to further advance the institutional perspective of informal entrepreneurship. The purpose of this paper is to address these issues.

Using face-to-face surveys of 322 street entrepreneurs from Lahore, Pakistan, the authors deploy the hitherto unused partial least square approach (PLS) to structural equation modeling (SEM) to analyze data within the field of informal entrepreneurship.

The empirical findings strongly support the theoretical propositions of the new institutional perspective that the authors present in their paper. The authors find no direct impact of factors like procedural justice, redistributive justice and public sector corruption (i.e. formal institutional failings) on the formalization intentions of street entrepreneurs. Their findings demonstrate that the relationship between formal institutional failings and formalization intentions can only be explained through the mediating role of institutional asymmetry (i.e. tax morality).

From a policy perspective, the authors find that if they can encourage street entrepreneurs to obtain a local-level registration as the first step toward formalization, it will significantly increase their chances to opt for higher national-level registrations.

This paper presents a unique attempt to further understand the context of street entrepreneurship through the theoretical lens of the institutional theory. In doing so, it synthesizes the arguments of existing institutional perspectives and further develops the institutional theory of informal entrepreneurship. Moreover, the paper develops the concept of “formalization intentions”.

This paper aims to report the findings of a study of nine countries in Europe and Central Asia (ECA) that have either recently introduced or are working towards the introduction of value-based recurrent property taxes. Although many countries have recurrent property taxes, often, they are not value-based and raise relatively little revenue. This paper examines the barriers to the introduction of value-based property taxes and discusses how they can be overcome.

Case studies of recurrent property taxation were undertaken for eight countries from the World Bank’s ECA region. The sample included countries at different stages in the development of value-based property tax systems. A ninth country, The Netherlands, which has a well-developed mass valuation system, was included for comparison.

Barriers to the introduction of value-based recurrent property taxes are technical and political or governance ones. The technical barriers include the comprehensiveness of property registration, the quality of transaction price data, the extent to which the valuation infrastructure meets internationally recognised standards and the quality of tax collection systems. The principal political and governance problems are the unpopularity of property taxes, the need to convince the public that they are fair and the lack of champions of property taxation in government.

The case studies are drawn from the ECA region, but the issues raised apply in many other parts of the world. A case study approach produces rich data for each example that enables key issues to be explored in depth.

The study has identified issues and ways of approaching them that are relevant to countries seeking to introduce value-based recurrent property taxes so that they can learn from the experience of others.

The approach has enabled a systematic comparison between countries so that common experiences and issues are identified.

Road transport is an important sector of the economy, however, its negative impacts on the environment, human health and sustainability of potential economic growth are significant. Transport externalities tend to be neglected within the market process. The damage generated through significant externalities of road transport in Czechia was identified, based on unique data processing, to reach almost 3.5 billion € annually. This chapter presents an overview of internalization taxes and fees, their current rates and generated receipts. If excise duty is disregarded as fundamentally unsuitable for the internalization of externalities, then the receipts from other applied taxes and fees, particularly the road tax, seem to be insufficient. Although economic growth is encouraged, its form is not sustainable in view of the rising phase of the Kuznets curve and the related irreversible environmental impacts.

Since its introduction in South Africa during 2009, the ability of vehicle emissions tax to reduce CO₂ emissions has been questioned, but not yet assessed. The purpose of this paper is to attempt such an assessment by considering tax designs to reduce passenger vehicle CO₂ emissions.

In this exploratory study, the authors reviewed literature on tax designs to reduce CO₂ emissions, and compared the design of current taxes on passenger vehicles in South Africa to the tax designs most advocated in the literature to evaluate the effectiveness of the current South African design for this purpose.

Tax designs refer to the stage when taxes are levied (purchase/ownership/usage taxes) – levying taxes at one stage may more effectively reduce emissions than levying them at another. The current tax focus on consumers may indeed affect taxes' ability to reduce emissions, and in the current tax mix, taxes on passenger vehicles may not be the most effective way of reducing emissions. The investigation of a “feebate” policy as an alternative initiative to address increased passenger vehicle CO₂ emissions is recommended.

Only anecdotal evidence questions the ability of the vehicle emissions tax to reduce CO₂ emissions. This study is intended to elicit further discussions on other fiscal reform initiatives aimed at reducing CO₂ emissions by passenger vehicles in South Africa.

Reform of government regulation of private business has been considered a cornerstone of good governance and a necessary condition for economic growth. Part of regulatory reform is reducing and streamlining administrative or procedural regulations imposed on business by government bureaucracies. Such regulations impose burdens on firms in terms of the time and effort required to file forms, delays in processing documents and applications and in granting approvals, transactional costs if charges are levied, and obstacles resulting from arbitrary decisions by government officials during the process. The chapter will consider the burdens on business caused by regulatory procedures imposed by bureaucracy in the countries of Southeast Asia, and how the reform of such procedures has varied across region, with a particular focus on certain key business functions, viz. starting a business, importing and exporting, paying taxes, and constructing a commercial building. The chapter will posit explanations of why such variation exists and will discuss links between reform of regulatory procedures and the level of social and economic development of a country. In conclusion, the scope for reform of regulatory procedures in those countries where they remain especially burdensome, will be examined, with consideration given to what reforms are necessary and feasible.

The purpose of the paper is to determine whether the Government of Jamaica's COVID-19 Allocation of Resources for Employees (CARE) Stimulus Response program provides a sufficient opportunity for formalization of the informal economy.

A careful examination of the program has been conducted, specifically through reading the CARE brochure, reading the budget presentation by the Minister of Finance in which the program was introduced and details highlighted, following program updates at COVID-19 Press briefings and the Minister's Twitter account, and following related articles and programs via original and social media.

This paper suggests that any capitalizing on the opportunity to promote formalization is insufficient. Early data show increased applications for licenses and registration by informal operators, but the CARE program is only short-term, and the benefits of formalization will have to surpass those of informality to be sufficiently attractive. Other attractors must necessarily involve simplifying the process of contributing to the National Insurance Scheme; and offering unemployment insurance; along with access to finance, education and training and policymaking opportunities. COVID-19 provides the possibility of a “new deal” for the informal economy that could yield productivity gains and more inclusive development.

This is one of the earliest examinations of how the short-term financial support schemes implemented by the GoJ as its COVID-19 Stimulus Response has been used as an incentive to formalize the large informal economy.