 Thank you very much and let me bring you greetings from the small but beautiful West African country called Seralio. Let me also apologize that first let me thank the UNIWIDE for inviting me to this session to serve as a discourse and for this very important topic and revenue mobilization. I couldn't make it in person and for that I apologize for several reasons first relating to the fact that for me to get a visa to Norway required me to travel to another country. Secondly, we just had some changes at the National Revenue Authority for which there is a new commissioner general that needed to support that transition. So it is on that grounds that I couldn't make the trip to Norway however I'm happy to actually serve as a discourse and in this case. So research around fiscal state and the tax capacity remains important for Africa of course and many low income countries as revenue mobilization remains low and far from adequate to support national development programs and meeting the SDGs by 2030. If fiscal capable governments can deliver development outcomes for citizens in several fronts, whether from social development, financing social development, investment in it, accountability improvement, therefore improving fiscal capacity will help not only to finance the SDGs but also to improve governance and reduce dependence on foreign aid. In this research on fiscal state, I know there are up to eight papers that have been published in the special issue but of course I'll focus my comments on the three papers that have been presented by Antonio Marina as well as all that. And then my presentation of course my comment, my discussion will actually be based on the policy implications of this findings and not on methodology rather both for South Saharan Africa but also my conscious rally on where I stay. So first let me start with the comments. I actually made something like three pages as a discussion notes but these are presentations. So let me start first with the first presentation by Antonio on fiscal states in developing countries. Which kind of introduces the various papers under this special issue so most of the eight papers under the special issues are already covered and summarized by Antonio in his presentation. So the insights from the program this research project are relevant and of course they have policy implications, important policy implications for South Saharan Africa. First the first one that LICs require time to build fiscal capacity and to be sustained primarily on tax revenues instead of foreign aid, resource revenues and non-tax revenues. But of course the question will come up how long will it take South Saharan Africa to be dependent on donors. Strong conditionalities are treated with bilateral aid and its high debt service requirements limit the flexibility afforded to LIC governments and lead the African continent to cycle of perpetual indebtedness. But then the questions for Antonio again. Can we have estimates of how long it will take some of our countries in Africa to actually reach the fiscal states level as defined by Caroline and Ijia in their conceptualization paper. Probably we need to get some estimates on that. The second policy implication from Antonio's paper is that politics matters. The argument is that any constraint on executive powers arising from tax revenues and political institutions is likely to coexist and even be reversed in the long run. This finding presents evidence on the need to provide some level of executive constraints to ensure accountability as well as tax revenue mobilization. But some questions here again. But should African government have to wait to face constraints before they learn how to tax? We have seen our development partners, particularly the IFIs, where they have employing constraints similar to these ones I have explained to ensure fiscal prudence. We also know the importance role of parliamentary oversight as a constraint to ensure the executive delivers and implement tax policies that are revenue enhancing. But then we have controlled parliament. They exist in Africa and they play a role in kind of enacting tax exemptions partly because they are not well remunerated and therefore the perseverance seeking the process of enacting most of the request for tax exemptions by the international companies, but also because they are affiliated with the ruling executive. While strong executive powers can help implement difficult tax policies, they can also lead limited oversight and formulation of policies that are not fiscal capacity enhancing and form productive expenditures to go and monitor it. The thought brought out by Antonio in terms of policy implications is that we have to look beyond fiscal capacity and think about other things such as information capacity, which of course are very important. In terms of information capacity, the study is on point when they argue that when states have accurate information about their subject populations, territories and economies, they are more effective at mobilizing revenues. But again here I have some important questions. What kind of information are states gathering about taxpayers and the population? What are the tools being used to catch a taxpayer information? What is being done with this information to inform risk management and compliance improvements in South Africa? In fact, are the politicians provided with the relevant information? Take for instance when it comes to exemptions, the same parliament that actually granted exemptions. Are they provided information in terms of revenue loss leads to these exemptions? So probably they might reconsider their decisions going forward in terms of the level of exemptions they are granting and that is actually affecting revenue mobilization. The final fact so that actually brought out by Antonio is that history matters as well. Of course our focus here on the Rwandan case, that in as much as history and political elites play the role in generating tax revenues during and following the 1994 genocide, the events of past three decades have had an outsized effect on the country's trajectory. Are these social networks still operational in contemporary Rwanda? That's another question. If they exist, what level of influence do they have on central government state capacity? Because we know in Rwanda at the moment how much these social groups are actually influencing revenue collection in Rwanda. Rwanda may be influenced by several other factors beyond those things when it comes to the performance of Rwanda revenue authority in terms of their fiscal capacity. The argument of Rwanda case study is that modern Rwanda state is a continuation of a particular type of traditional state in Africa. Social contracts indeed are still very much important in Africa, particularly in rural settings. The extent to which they are exact, their influence is not very clear. What is clear however is that ethnic and regional cohesions still exist in most African countries and still hold role in elections. And to the extent that they influence state capacity, I would rather say that is on ethical state capacity since others are left out. So in essence, it is obvious that understanding that the responsibility of revenue mobilization is not only a tax administration matter. It's quite important for rural revenue mobilization as state capacity in Africa. It is not uncommon in the African context for low revenue GDP ratios to be associated with poor performance from revenue administrations. This is actually usually on revenue administrations whenever revenue GDP is quite low. On the grounds that there is inability to improve compliance or expand the tax space and of course implement technographic reforms that raise revenue collection. But then the role of tax policy, weak economic growth especially in taxable sectors, the prevalence of exemptions granted by politicians as the parliament and the executive are mostly ignored. Now my comment on the second presentation by Marina, which is of course important on the importance of state assigned property rights to state compliance and to tax compliance in sub-Saharan Africa. It starts important handings with relevant policy implications. The paper makes it clear that strong property rights can play a dual function. As the authors note, state of health property rights may increase tax concerns. Property rights also enable additional mechanisms through which to raise revenue. Cadastras are an important component of the state's ability to identify tax payers and of course raise revenue. Freetown, which is the capital city of Australia, is investing in its cadastra, having already identified most property within the city and is combining this with a simplified point based method for assessing property values. This has already held to increase municipal revenue and ensuring that the tax burden on low tax, low income resident is lowered since they are using actually point based system, which is transparent and of course can enhance trust in the process. However, achieving the requirement for revenue adequacy of 14% of GDP to finance sustainable development goals by 2030 cannot be accomplished through property taxes alone as also highlighted by the author. The importance of property rights makes it therefore hinges on its ability to influence willingness to pay other forms of taxes, particularly those collected by central governments. While the applicability of the findings of this study for urban areas where the land tenor system provides for state-backed ownership of land is relevant, what should we make of the findings for rural areas, given the fact that most of the land is traditionally owned? Relatedly, how should we expect the value of land to affect the degree to which strong property rights influence tax concerns? A significant motivating factor behind the payment of property taxes in urban areas is the risk that non-payment prevents the transfer of ownership. In Sierra Leone, land is considerably cheaper in rural areas, and competition for ownership of land for developmental purposes is not as high as we can find in urban areas. Correspondingly, people in rural settings are not as insistent on getting land ownership legislated. So long as the land-owning families have demarcated the piece of land, they may both be interested, these may both be interested in the urban structure for future research, if the researchers may be interested in that. And now on the final presentation by Audit on pre-colonial centralisation and tax compliance norms in contemporary Uganda. This research has very important findings and very interesting ones as well, that explain the role of historical institutions in contemporary fiscal states and to provide explanations on the root causes of variation in the quality of institutions and norms that lead to differences in tax compliance. The extent to which these historical legacies continue to influence tax attitude and tax authorities today, however it is not fully clear. And some questions. Does this digital era generation where we have younger people in Africa, do they really care about the historical impact of today's compliance needs? Is foreign influence or the need for regional comparison not rather play an important role in explaining current tax compliance? Is the tax system structure not rather influenced by tax administration assessment tools such as others? If you go to most African countries in terms of the structure of the tax system, they look at other comparative countries and they look at all these standard instruments, tax diagnostic assessment tools that assess tax administrations and then they will design the tax system consistent with that. Tools like TADAT, ISURA are not a tax outlook. Things like the MTR is the IMF-Middle Terms 7 strategy. They have some consistent things, some standards that they expect countries to actually implement. If you look at the DTM by the OECD, the digital transformation maturity models, they also have standards that they expect our countries to actually implement if they want to reach some digital maturity. So I think some of these things actually kind of influence most of the design of structures in Africa rather than even the historical structures. Probably for informal taxes that are largely collected by village chiefs, the importance of this pre-colonial institutional background matters as their rural assets are still instilling them the relevance of honouring these taxes. Now in rural areas we find out that there is persistence on trust in local authorities, the need to obey authorities and as well as persistence in social cohesion. To these findings are personally quite interesting as we've recently completed a study on the Israel National Revenue Authority's tax pay education programmes. We know substantial inter-regional variability in the measures of tax-moral and willingness to comply with tax obligations. We also observe inter-regional differences along individual measures of our tax-moral index as they relate to willingness to pay taxes. If they were confident they would be spent to support the respondents' community or country, willingness to cheat on taxes and trust that taxes would be spent wisely. So political relations of course play a large role in this but it is interesting to think about the potential role that historical institutions also play. The findings that trust in the central government is not strongly associated with tax compliance, especially in the context of Australia and similar countries. We have some areas we think are governance precincts. Informal taxes are paid in amounts similar to formal taxes. Now a recent study by ICTD International Centre for Tax and Development in 2019 found that the perceptions of fairness of informal taxes are higher despite informal taxes being more generally increased. They suggest the mechanism may be that taxpayers trust informal institutions more than the states and believe that taxes will be good to good use. If the proportion of taxes paid to central government is lower, it makes sense that we see the role of trust in central government to be less important than interpersonal trust and norms to obey authorities. Pre-colonial and colonial institutions continue to shape how taxes are levied in Australia. Paramount chiefs play an important role in collecting some form of taxation and their discussion about how NRI can partner in these structures, including even the MTRS, the Midtown Times Revenue Strategy, to see how the National Revenue Tourism can naturally partner not only with paramount chiefs but also local governments in the collection of property taxes as well as other form of taxes. So in conclusion, the need to understand that besides the technocratic and administrative capacity of revenue administration, that politics institutional determinants and economic factors matter in the context of strength and fiscal capacity for enhanced revenue and should be something for our African governments and development partners of course to consider in dealing with revenue mobilization in sub-Saharan Africa in particular. Therefore, I look forward to further research on this thematic area of fiscal states as I'm convinced of its relevance for changing the African story of revenue mobilization in addition to the technocratic fix widely suggested by our researchers as well as tax performance. Some of the questions I've raised during the course of this discussion I believe could be areas of consideration for future research in this thematic area. Thank you. Thank you very much, Philip. Thank you. I wanted to leave some time for questions and I think Philip put some questions to the panelists. Is it okay if we go to the room first for any quick points but more specifically questions and we have about ten minutes to run through. So hands up from the floor, let's assemble a few and then come back to the panel if that's okay. Okay. I'm looking for any women with the hands up. Okay. So the flurry of gentlemen in the front. And if you can say where you're from. Thank you. I hear you're from UNDESA. There it goes. I hear it now. So two quick questions. One, I was very interested to think even further back in history. I read a bunch of literature recently about the origin of the state in ancient times. And you know the point that a number of the authors were making is that key factor in the origin of the state itself was the ability to tax. And that what kind of agricultural produce was being produced and whether that could be taxed. And I wondered how you think that might fit into the case of Uganda. The difference between why you have these two different regions, the non-state region and the state region and how does that feed through to those pre-colonial institutions and then into present day. And then I wondered also for Marina, because it's a very interesting, you know, it's a nice policy intervention. Let's make your cadastre a better cadastre. We can improve. Great. But you know, it may also come with, you know, Antonio talked about other kinds of public goods and services that are being provided. And if a state has limited resources to invest, which one is going to give the biggest bang for the buck? And have you looked at some of that and whether investing in doing some of the property rights kind of intervention would be better or whether delivering better health care or better education? And because I also wonder about the, you know, kind of a cadastre is all or nothing where you might be able to, if you can't manage all or nothing, maybe some of the other interventions might give you a little bit of boost. So is there any evidence for any of that kind of thing? Did you look at any of those kind of cross interesting comparisons? Okay, should we take one more before we go back to the panel? Oliver Morrissey, University of Nottingham. One for odd and not in the context of your analysis because I know it's not available, but more generally from your knowledge of the literature. You know, you demonstrate an association with tax morale and how people answer a question of, you know, should you pay taxes type of question. But what is the evidence or is there evidence linking that to them actually paying taxes? Because it's one thing what people say, it's another thing what they do and I'm just interested to know if there's any evidence on that. And a quick one from Marina, is there anything about changes in property rights? Because that may be more important than the actual structure that's there. I think I don't know exactly what you mean by changing property rights and we observe changes in the extent of... And the type of cadastre because even like in 1950s there was a lot of narrative cadastres. Now it's almost gone. So this is there is we observe a change and also the extent. This is when it comes to cadastre and formalizing property rights in terms of like maybe the question is different. The changes in property rights types, I don't know what you mean exactly. At any time we observe a change in cost. Yeah, no, I mean, but we do I hope capture this change, right? So the at least the variation, at least there is no there is not much change in terms of like, you know, we see qualitative change from in a situation from New York customary to more state. It's like more on the margin changes to be honest over the period. So there was we haven't observed the massive qualitative change maybe except for other actually where they which brings us to the question about the politics. Matter right. I also come to this state state kind of literature from the experience of studying the history of Swedish state. And you know, it was easy for Gustav Wazer king who introduced the taxation because he decided that it's going to be the case and there was no notions of democracy. There was no notions of individual liberties. You know, it that there was no recourse to that, you know, for cities, citizens resisted, but there was no now. Yes, again, if you look at Rhonda, it's a success from the point of your formalization of property rights. But we know that the story is normatively right a little bit tasty because it's also accompanied with a lot of dictatorial type of politics. So it's a difficult right. So it's a difficult situation for the again when we talk about how long it takes to so it's like the steps. I agree with this, but Sweden roll out mapped disaster in 40 years with 30 surveyors in from 1628 until 1960 70s. It's not a long story right. But there was like there was no the politics was conducive to this, you know, and the politics, I think with the democracy as a norm and individual rights, it's doing it. Gustav Wazer becomes unpalatable right this day. So we are facing this question as well. I think I will answer quickly both of this question. I don't know other interventions. I mean, you know, you say policy health policy. I mean from I am state capacity scholar. This is not state capacity for me right. It's like boosting the other side of the fiscal exchange right to provide something that people will pay. I don't know perhaps it is possible we haven't ventured into this. Similarly, I really like this point about the against Sierra Leone is one of the success stories in the land and property tax revenue. And cadastra is not enough cadastra is only about property rights. We need also a system of valuation and the situation with this even worse around the world and not only in developing countries and developed countries as well. So then then with cadastra. Two minutes left. Thank you so much. I think your question or comment was about tracing the history of taxation further back than what we do here. This is also this is of course a question about what information data you have available. But I think 15 years ago we didn't believe it was possible to do this type of studies which Michel Appeluz and none and other were doing. And there are a number of economic historians working on this now. And you have also now established the African economic history network which are really digging into things not related necessarily to taxation. But the evolution of state and and and societies. So I was just thinking about. Well, you have the Weber and Wieldafsky book from 1986. The history of taxation and expenditure in the western world which goes back to Babylon or earlier and traces the whole. That could be an interesting long term research project. The history of taxation and expenditure in Sub-Saharan Africa. But it will be a long term project you have to because data information is challenging. But it's very interesting when Oliver. Yes, I completely agree with you that the Afrobarometer is perception based and then it's easy to say. Yes, I'm willing to pay tax. Given often given that services are provided. We don't know here whether actually people actually pay taxes. That is now the next step. And I have a big faith here that by using by getting access to administrative data you can do that more. And that is something we also try now in Tanzania to link up administrative data with survey data. Of course as we discussed yesterday there are challenges here with the administrative data. But I think that is a way to move forward to get more credible results here. Thank you. Antonia, would you address Philip's question about when will countries like Sierra Leone become state? Sure, actually I was thinking the same. Thank you Philip. That was probably the point that really resonates with my own thinking. We've been arguing that Rome wasn't built in a day. But then how long does it take to become a fiscal state? A legitimate question. Let me be brief and at the same time humbled. One way to go about this is to do further research. Kunal and I were already thinking about this. Do we see any episodes of a change in taxation that are significant especially in Sub-Saharan Africa? And what explains that? So that's for us. We agree with you Philip. This is definitely, you know, there is room for further research is a very good point. If I had to provide, you know, really be bold almost the point of being careless and provide an estimate, I could say let's look at the fiscal history of advanced economies. It took probably at least the whole of last century to develop fiscal states. Because pre-World War I data show that states were very small in terms of taxation be around that time. But I wouldn't be doing a good job if I tell you that. Because we know that how history unfolded in advanced economies. For example, look at the role of external conflict. This is not necessarily the case. It doesn't mean that this will explain how long it takes in a less developed economy context. And finally on this point, we did try some rough econometric estimates in our own paper with Abrams and Kunal. We did some so-called causality tests to see roughly is it political institutions that feedback cause taxation or is it also the other way around. And we had the data about 200 years for a sample of developed and emerging economies. And what we found was not particularly interesting in the sense that we found that heterogeneity in our estimates was pervasive. We used Abrams did some great work with maritime series on that. So we thought we concluded that we couldn't really say too much about the dynamics. So a bit disappointing at this stage, Philip, but that's what I can share on this. And I'll stop here. Thank you, that's great. So I think it's been a great session. So thank you very much to Antonio, Marina, Odhelge and Philip. I guess I have to say more questions in the lunch queue, please. And to finish with a round of applause, I think our panelists have deserved it. So thank you.