 Every country around the world needs to raise revenue in order to provide all of the things the people who live in that country want. Things from roads to communications infrastructure, schooling, hospitals. Every country has a slightly different configuration of goods that it wants to see provided or services it wants to see provided by its government. And there are a limited number of ways in which governments can effectively raise revenue to fund those kinds of activities. But the primary instrument they use to do that is the tax system. And so one of the reasons why it's an important and interesting area for study is because it is so integrated into our civic fabric. A good exercise in terms of thinking about the kinds of challenges that a low-income country might face in designing a tax system is to spend some time thinking about how you would design a tax system if you had to start at the very beginning. So many low-income countries have inherited tax systems from colonial periods. So they might have a legacy of income tax law, for example, but they don't have a tax law that is necessarily made for that country, by that country. And so the challenges that they face in trying to design a system that works for them in the current climate are the same challenges you would imagine if you thought about designing one in some ways from scratch. Many tax scholars, myself included, love the big policy questions about tax design and think about those questions in the context of low-income countries. So when we're doing that we're trying to think about, you know, how would you resolve issues around the appropriate taxation of corporations, for example. These are kind of big policy questions at a high level that every country needs to answer. But at another level, and in some ways a really fun and interesting level that's less common in the kind of work that lots of tax academics do, is the question about how do those high-level kind of policy discussions actually hit the ground? How do you administer a tax system in a world where you may not have electricity for hours or days on a regular basis? How do you administer a tax system when not everyone in administration has access to a working computer? How do you administer a tax system when there isn't a natural body of work available for you to read, because it's not in your language, that describes what a tax system is trying to accomplish or achieve? All of those kinds of very practical daily problems can actually mean that the very best designs for tax systems simply don't work somewhere. And so those questions are really interesting to me, the ones about how do we take our best practices, the things we think will work well, but make them real in the context of what's actually happening in a particular low-income country. Some of the work that I do, I think of as a kind of applied form of scholarship and the advantage of that is I have the opportunity in my desk here at the Schulich School of Law to sit and think for long periods of time about tax system design. There are times when I'm then invited to come and spend some time with a government who is trying to redesign some or all of its tax system. And my job in those moments is to bring some of that work that I've done into the conversation with the appropriate amount of deference for the expertise that I don't have, which is all of the local conditions that inform what they're trying to accomplish. And so those conversations often involve me trying to articulate a range of different possible choices that the country can use in its tax system design based on what I've seen in other countries and based on my own research. Then you're in a discussion after that about why some of those ways of solving tax problems will work, why they might not work, what the challenges would be, what kinds of changes would be necessary in order for them to be useful there. That kind of interaction between someone who has the luxury of some time and space to think about tax problems and people who are in the press of the daily operations of a tax administration is part of the joy of this job. It's being able to serve as a kind of hinge, if I can call it that, between what's really happening for real people on the ground and what's possible. If you want to see a world where you find there aren't children living in desperate poverty or with incredible hunger, where there aren't women who die in childbirth, where there are reasonable transportation systems so that people are able to travel for meaningful employment and all of those kinds of things that make life worth living, then you need to be able to have some resources and you need to have strong governments that can use those resources wisely. The tax system, however odd that is for people, is the entry point, I think, to doing that kind of work and so not everyone has to love or want to study tax law the way that I do, but most people at least can see the benefit and importance of having a strong tax system that works in terms of the consequences of that in their real life.