 Good morning everyone. Yeah, this paper is co-authored with Jose Alejandro Perez-Cajias and Hillel Seufer and we have also been part of the special issue on the text date by Kunal and and Antonio and so what I'm gonna do today is to talk about information capacity and its relationship to the text date and Here I mean when we think about Fiscal capacity of state of taxation it there is a large literature that treats taxation Fiscal capacity as a very foundation of the state so the ability of the state to mobilize resources to extract revenues from society is the basis for Pretty much everything else in this perspective so states require resources in order to exercise control and to pursue their projects and This has led to some of the cross-national literature to also Treat tax per capita or income tax per capita. It's a common measure of overall state strength Well one issue here with this perspective on the state is that Taxation is often the matter of policy decision and second as we have heard from Leander and State capacity is not necessarily limited to Fiscal capacity state time. There's also large literature that reminds us that we should look at state capacity as something multidimensional and that's Our starting point So let me drill a little bit deeper here. So when we look at established explanation of Why do some states have fiscal capacity? Why are they able to tax effectively and others? don't I mean at this conference. I've attended fascinating panels on the role of conflict Yeah, and especially civil conflict in yeah in shaping the capacity to tax But also the role of natural resources. Yeah, it's mining activities So There is a large literature on this questions and But when you look at the the classical theoretical arguments around the creation of of tax dates There's one and that focus that's the perspective advanced by Charles Tillies and others that focuses on the role of external threats broadly defined as a multivator as an engine For the creation of of fiscal capacity. So basically, yeah, this war Make states and states make war. Yeah, this this kind of quit by Chuck Tilly and then there is another perspective Yeah, advanced but Margaret level levy and and Olson On this so on the famous stationary states as stationary bandits Yeah, so there's an sort of the the main motive here self-enrichments Rulers invest in the capacity to tax to move yeah from sort of taxing Production to taxing people and their wealth and this is kind of like a more sustained way to to generate In any case what connects these two perspective on the states is that they focus on the motives of tax-state creation but What we are doing in this paper and that's a second motivation for us is to look at Yeah, the sort of not just at the motives but also at the like when our states or when our rule is capable of Engaging and taxation and this brings me to the recent Informational turn in the study of the state and so there's a growing literature across the social sciences that You know starting from the idea that that states state capacities Multidimensional puts the spotlight on the ability of tack of states to gather and Systematically analyze information about their subject population Think here about the population sensors the creation of statistical offices land cadastres and So on and this perspective goes back to James Scott. Yeah, and his emphasis on Making society on the idea of legibility. So making societies legible is a very central aspect of state development and the one Scholar who has put this most succinctly is Melissa Lee who recently Suggested states that cannot gather accurate information about their populations are likely to do little else effectively and Okay, so then Let's think this through and that's the main contribution of the paper is Okay, so if states if sort of the foundation is information How does it relate to tax capacity and our main claim that we advance is that Information capacity facilitates tax capacity and I get to the theoretical part of the argument in a second just to foreshadow The way in which we approach this is by a mixed methods approach So we link sort of a global statistical analysis that looks at associations between measures of information capacity and fiscal capacity with Historical case studies of Argentina and Chile that allow us to flesh out some of the the mechanisms that we think are Underpinning this relationship Okay, so the main argument we we advance is that information capacity facilitates tax capacity So rulers in this perspective need to have accurate information About the basic characteristics wealth and whereabouts of the subject populations in order to tax effectively But how does this work exactly this and here we draw on yeah broadly on the the idea of economies of scope so and one More specific mechanism is the reuse of population. So once the state is able to Collect information to administer a population sensors to have accurate information on Yeah, land holdings of their and properties of their populations they can reuse this information from from population censuses for taxation for military conscription for the provision of health services or for reminding you about the driving license and the Reaching the driving age of family members Yeah, so you can reuse information this basic information for multiple purposes and that yeah Creates efficiency gains and the second mechanism is is what we call the repurposing of the information No apparatus. So once you have state agents that are trained in the collection of information Yeah, you can you can use them also again for for other purposes and you can you can move them around to Yeah from the statistics office to the tax agency And so on and we we observed this for example in in 19th century Chile that you have these career moves of People who initially started out in the statistical office Okay, so our argument is information capacity facilitates state capacity And not so much the other way around of course the first I mean I'm talking to a lot of economists here So reverse causality. Well, let me just say Two things on this first Like and that's the Raji historical again based on our case studies is that What we observe is that? Usually you can you of course you need some resources, but you can usually these The formation of static information capacity requires only very relatively small number of Agents and it's and it's often also that the state appropriates Information-gathering capacity from other non-state actors in the case of Chile This was the Catholic Church and it's it's Church registers and so on and so it's rather non-costly and so What I'm saying is essentially these were rather small enterprises that require very or comparatively little resources Yeah as an argument against that it might also be the other way around anyway We get to that in the case study. So let me first walk you through the the quantitative part of our analysis we measure information capacity by the so-called state capacity scores Collected by Melissa Lee and Zhang and here this measures This measure measures legibility of citizens by looking at the quality of population censuses like whether the age distribution in a population Censuses follows a smooth curve Or wait whether you have the clustering around certain ages like zero and five and Disclustering yeah, which is called age heaping is Indicative of limited information capacity because either Citizens don't have birth certificates don't know their exact age then the the person conducting the The Population censuses takes a wild guess. It's usually with a zero Yeah, and age with a zero or a five at the end or They're inherent problems or constraints within Yeah, the the informational apparatus. Yeah that Agents just don't Interview or consult with with citizens but rather make the numbers up and it's very hard to make numbers up in a consistent way So you usually also have this kind of clustering effects either way So this this is it's it's a measure of the quality of the population censuses We check we do robustness checks with other measures of information capacity. There's an kind of The so-called information capacity index that looks at the presence of a statistical office the regular administration of population censuses the presence of a Registry and so on so this is like a more More abstract How do you say? Anyway, it's it's another way to looking at Information capacity fiscal capacity well the UNU wider government revenue data set and we look at different kinds of taxes The main one being direct taxes on income land personal Property profits and capital gains because that's really like where the the it's the direct effort of states to collect Revenues from from individuals Indirect taxes such as that we also look at this probably needs somewhat less Yeah, the fiscal capacity, but then we also cross check for total tax revenues and resource revenues which we do not Expect to be positively as those or associated with information capacity Income income taxes we controlled for but the problem is that in much like in the global sample We are looking at looking at personal income tax made only a very very small part of the overall tax revenue gathered by By states okay, so here you have the the the table with our results and And yeah sort of in the first column you have we just run the main measure of interest legibility and then with we run the same again with a number of relevant controls and The results are Broadly in sync with our expectations. There's a positive Association between legibility and Direct taxes, but also total tax indirect taxes There's a negative association between legibility and total resource revenue sort of the taxes that come from natural resources and Also interesting. Yeah personal income tax. There is I mean it the the coefficient is in the expected direction But ultimately it doesn't turn out statistically significant again Sort of the small here. Yeah to to highlight the small percentage of personal income tax In in much of the developing world Okay, so brought these wow I've been going slow. Okay, so let's be how much do I have? three okay Thank You Leanna for for speeding up so Okay, so the case study I just walk you through very quickly through one of the case studies and and this is is Chile there's also Argentina in the paper and One argument the case study makes is So already before the nitrate commodity boom in the 1980s Sorry in the 1880s and before the war of the Pacific Chile was one of the most developed tax states in Latin America. So this goes against this Bellasist approach that tax that wars make tax states and and so on and also Yeah shed light on on that the nitrate commodity boom was not was not an engine of the creation of the tax states So you have this increase steady increase from the 1840s onwards and Here we sort of to look at this trend. Yeah from the 1840s until the 1880s So what's the association here between? Sort of to information capacity and so yeah, you have a What we find is that a statistics office has been established The census taking quality has has improved in this period their regular statistical yearbooks published So really like systematic state record keeping on a variety of economic Activities and demographics characteristics of the population takes off during this time period and And in that in that period we also find That it the introduction of a land cadastre came before Yeah, the introduction of property tax collection. So land cadastre preceded Yeah, the introduction of of property tax collection and its implementation and Then also another indication for this link between information capacity and fiscal capacities that many of the taxes were eliminated Of the direct taxes were eliminated during the nitrate boom in the in the late 19th century but once the nitrate boom stopped and Other like sources for fertilizers were discovered that so the nitrate didn't have to be exported from Chile to Europe anymore and this capacity to collect information Continued and it and very quickly the Chilean state then returned to Various forms of direct taxation in the early 20th century, okay, so Do I still have 30 seconds so So what this study brings in is information capacity as an underappreciated factor into the study of fiscal capacity And Cautions against just using fiscal capacity as a shorthand for overall state strength Maybe in terms of policy implications two things that I am happy to elaborate on one is this cautions our research cautions against the privatization of Information gathering that happens in many countries in the moment for example in Sweden that the state outsources Yeah, basic information collection sensors taking to private companies from what we have Studied this might not be such a great idea. Also, we're engaging in debates around the creation of pockets of effectiveness yeah, that often focus on strengthen the the Yeah, the bureaucratic competence of the tax agency in countries sure, but You see the linkages yeah, and the inter linkages to information capacity So what we advocate is not just focused on The tax agency as a pocket of efficiency, but also take yeah more multi-dimensional focus on other Yeah, the state offices such as yeah the Statistics office, which is very important. Anyway, I leave it at that. Thank you very much