Mick Moore is a political economist and professorial fellow at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex. He is also the founding CEO of the International Centre for Tax and Development. [1]
Mick Moore | |
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| Nationality | British |
| Occupation | political economist |
| Children | 2 |
| Institutions | Institute of Development Studies, International Centre for Tax and Development |
Main interests | Governance, Public policy, State-building, Economic inequality, Tax reform |
Moore has conducted field research in Asia and Africa, particularly Sri Lanka, India, and Taiwan, and has taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. [3] He was previously the director of the Centre for the Future State, and is a member of the OECD Task Force on Tax and Development. [4] [5] [6] His main research interests are the domestic and international dimensions of good and bad governance in developing countries, particularly those relating to taxation. He focuses on the process by which widening the tax base in low-income countries can help foster a social contract between citizens and the government through associated demands for public services. [7] [8] In contrast to receiving revenue from foreign aid or natural resources, governments who rely on taxes have to bargain with their citizens, and have incentives to promote their prosperity, thereby enhancing good governance. [9] As an expert on these issues, he has been called several times to speak as a witness for the UK Parliament International Development Committee. [10] [11] [12] [13]
His book Taxing Africa: Coercion, Reform and Development was published by Zed Books in July 2018. Co-authored with Wilson Prichard and Odd-Helge Fjeldstad, the book offers a comprehensive and accessible introduction to the crucial debates around taxation and development in Africa. It examines issues from tax evasion by multinational corporations and African elites to how ordinary people navigate complex webs of ‘informal’ local taxation, examining the challenges and the potential for reform. [14]
Mick Moore has published extensively on the issue of governance in the developing world, and his work has been widely cited, demonstrated by his h-index of 48 on Google Scholar. [15]
A tax is a compulsory financial charge or some other type of levy imposed on a taxpayer by a governmental organization in order to collectively fund government spending, public expenditures, or as a way to regulate and reduce negative externalities. Tax compliance refers to policy actions and individual behaviour aimed at ensuring that taxpayers are paying the right amount of tax at the right time and securing the correct tax allowances and tax relief. The first known taxation took place in Ancient Egypt around 3000–2800 BC. Taxes consist of direct or indirect taxes and may be paid in money or as its labor equivalent.
Land reform is a form of agrarian reform involving the changing of laws, regulations, or customs regarding land ownership. Land reform may consist of a government-initiated or government-backed property redistribution, generally of agricultural land. Land reform can, therefore, refer to transfer of ownership from the more powerful to the less powerful, such as from a relatively small number of wealthy or noble owners with extensive land holdings to individual ownership by those who work the land. Such transfers of ownership may be with or without compensation; compensation may vary from token amounts to the full value of the land.
Tax competition, a form of regulatory competition, exists when governments use reductions in fiscal burdens to encourage the inflow of productive resources or to discourage the exodus of those resources. Often, this means a governmental strategy of attracting foreign direct investment, foreign indirect investment, and high value human resources by minimizing the overall taxation level and/or special tax preferences, creating a comparative advantage.
Development aid is a type of foreign/international/overseas aid given by governments and other agencies to support the economic, environmental, social, and political development of developing countries. Closely related concepts include: developmental aid, development assistance, official development assistance, development policy, development cooperation and technical assistance. It is distinguished from humanitarian aid by aiming at a sustained improvement in the conditions in a developing country, rather than short-term relief. Development aid is thus widely seen as a major way to meet Sustainable Development Goal 1 for the developing nations.
Aid effectiveness is the degree of success or failure of international aid. Concern with aid effectiveness might be at a high level of generality, or it might be more detailed.
An indirect tax is a tax that is levied upon goods and services before they reach the customer who ultimately pays the indirect tax as a part of market price of the good or service purchased. Alternatively, if the entity who pays taxes to the tax collecting authority does not suffer a corresponding reduction in income, i.e., impact and tax incidence are not on the same entity meaning that tax can be shifted or passed on, then the tax is indirect.
State-building as a specific term in social sciences and humanities, refers to political and historical processes of creation, institutional consolidation, stabilization and sustainable development of states, from the earliest emergence of statehood up to the modern times. Within historical and political sciences, there are several theoretical approaches to complex questions related to the role of various contributing factors in state-building processes.
The concepts of security sector governance and reform generally refer to a process in Western-based international development and democratization to amend the security sector of a state towards good governance and its principles, such as freedom of information and the rule of law.
David Woodward is a British economist and economic advisor. He graduated from Keble College, Oxford in philosophy, politics and economics in 1982. After graduating, he joined the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London, where he worked as an economic advisor working on debt, structural adjustment and other development issues, with emphasis on Latin America and South East Asia.
Optimal tax theory or the theory of optimal taxation is the study of designing and implementing a tax that maximises a social welfare function subject to economic constraints. The social welfare function used is typically a function of individuals' utilities, most commonly some form of utilitarian function, so the tax system is chosen to maximise the aggregate of individual utilities. Tax revenue is required to fund the provision of public goods and other government services, as well as for redistribution from rich to poor individuals. However, most taxes distort individual behavior, because the activity that is taxed becomes relatively less desirable; for instance, taxes on labour income reduce the incentive to work. The optimization problem involves minimizing the distortions caused by taxation, while achieving desired levels of redistribution and revenue. Some taxes are thought to be less distorting, such as lump-sum taxes and Pigouvian taxes, where the market consumption of a good is inefficient, and a tax brings consumption closer to the efficient level.
The Tanzania Revenue Authority (TRA) is the government agency of Tanzania, charged with the responsibility of managing the assessment, collection and accounting of all central government revenue in Tanzania.
The Institute of Development Studies (IDS) is a research and learning organisation affiliated with the University of Sussex in Brighton, England, and based on its campus in Falmer, East Sussex. It delivers research and teaching in the area of development studies.
Civil service reform is a deliberate action to improve the efficiency, effectiveness, professionalism, representativity and democratic character of a civil service, with a view to promoting better delivery of public goods and services, with increased accountability. Such actions can include data gathering and analysis, organizational restructuring, improving human resource management and training, enhancing pay and benefits while assuring sustainability under overall fiscal constraints, and strengthening measures for performance management, public participation, transparency, and combating corruption.
Raymond Carey Bush is a professor of African studies at the school of politics and international studies (POLIS) at the University of Leeds. He is a member of the Leeds University Centre for African Studies (LUCAS) advisory board and deputy chair of the Review of African Political Economy (ROAPE). Bush is married to Dr. Mette Wiggen, a fellow academic at POLIS.
Government revenue or national revenue is money received by a government from taxes and non-tax sources to enable it to undertake public expenditure. Government revenue as well as government spending are components of the government budget and important tools of the government's fiscal policy. The collection of revenue is the most basic task of a government, as revenue is necessary for the operation of government, provision of the common good and enforcement of its laws; this necessity of revenue was a major factor in the development of the modern bureaucratic state.
The New Bottom Billion refers to the 960 million or so poor people who live in Middle Income Countries (MICs). Based on research by Andy Sumner, a Research Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies, the New Bottom Billion raises serious questions about Paul Collier’s original Bottom Billion thesis, particularly in relation to its claims regarding the geographical distribution of global poverty. While Collier argued that the Bottom Billion are to be found in the poorest 60 or so economies, Sumner's research shows that the majority of the world's poor actually live in MICs such as China, India, Nigeria and Indonesia. The New Bottom Billion therefore suggests that poverty is not just a Low Income Country (LIC) problem, and that further policy discussions are called for.
Base erosion and profit shifting (BEPS) refers to corporate tax planning strategies used by multinationals to "shift" profits from higher-tax jurisdictions to lower-tax jurisdictions or no-tax locations where there is little or no economic activity, thus "eroding" the "tax-base" of the higher-tax jurisdictions using deductible payments such as interest or royalties. For the government, the tax base is a company's income or profit. Tax is levied as a percentage on this income/profit. When that income / profit is transferred to another country or tax haven, the tax base is eroded and the company does not pay taxes to the country that is generating the income. As a result, tax revenues are reduced and the government is detained. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) define BEPS strategies as "exploiting gaps and mismatches in tax rules". While some of the tactics are illegal, the majority are not. Because businesses that operate across borders can utilize BEPS to obtain a competitive edge over domestic businesses, it affects the righteousness and integrity of tax systems. Furthermore, it lessens deliberate compliance, when taxpayers notice multinationals legally avoiding corporate income taxes. Because developing nations rely more heavily on corporate income tax, they are disproportionately affected by BEPS.
The International Centre for Tax and Development (ICTD) is a research centre based at the Institute of Development Studies. The ICTD is focused on improving tax policy and administration in lower-income countries through collaborative research and engagement. It supports its partners in raising more revenue to fund public services in ways that are efficient, equitable, and strengthen accountability.
Fiscal capacity is the ability of the state to extract revenues to provide public goods and carry out other functions of the state, given an administrative, fiscal accounting structure. In economics and political science, fiscal capacity may be referred to as tax capacity, extractive capacity or the power to tax, as taxes are a main source of public revenues. Nonetheless, though tax revenue is essential to fiscal capacity, taxes may not be the government's only source of revenue. Other sources of revenue include foreign aid and natural resources.
The global minimum corporate tax rate, or simply the global minimum tax, is a minimum rate of tax on corporate income internationally agreed upon and accepted by individual jurisdictions. Each country would be eligible to a share of revenue generated by the tax. The aim is to reduce tax competition between countries and discourage multinational corporations (MNC) from profit shifting to achieve tax avoidance.
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