One of the central challenges facing low-income and developing countries is to mobilize sufficient tax revenue to support finance, when combined with whatever aid is available, the expenditures needed for growth and poverty relief and to do so in a way that does not itself undercut those objectives by unduly worsening preexisting distortions or inequities. To describe and assess the way in which developing countries were addressing these problem.
Many of the characteristics of developing countries make the problem of revenue mobilization particularly difficult. Informal activities are extensive, tending to imply a relatively narrow potential tax the agricultural sector hard to tax in all countries, for both practical taxpayers to comply with tax rules, and of the authorities to administer them, is likely to be relatively low and corruption is often pervasive. All these features constrain effective taxation. Moreover, many of them are themselves likely to be affected by tax system in force. Heavy taxation of the formal sector will tend to encourage growth of the information sector for instance, and inappropriate tax design may provide further opportunities they are an order of magnitude more significant in the developing world posing problems for tax design in these countries to which the public finance literature has scant attention.
One implication of these distinctive concerns is that the link between tax policy and tax administration is especially intimate in developing countries. It has been famously claimed, indeed, that in developing countries “tax administration is tax policy.” This may be going too far any administration operates within the broad confines of some policy framework, even if only to abuse and even misrepresent it. But it is clear that disconnect between what tax rules say and what actually happens can be especially great in the developing world, and that this needs to be taken into account in designing tax policy. While the distinction between tax policy and administration is particularly blurred in developing countries, it is the broad policy design that sets the stage for implementation.