 So, I have the pleasure to discuss these three really interesting projects, three published articles and one working paper. And since most of the work is published, my role isn't so much to give comments into the publication, but to think a bit about some of the broader implications, maybe some linkages with policy and then some possible points for discussion. So as I think Dan has summarized well in the opening remarks and the presenters also have summarized well that these three papers, these three projects offer really interesting insights on state capacity and I just highlight a few more implications for the literature on state capacity. I think Matthias' work and Matthias and colleagues' work really does a great job of spotlighting the importance, let me stand, of informational capacity and in particular not only distinguishing informational capacity but showing how informational capacity can be sort of a precursor to fiscal capacity. This has a number of really interesting implications for the literature but one that's jumped out to me was implications for measurement of state capacity. And many of you will know there are a number of measures of state capacity and of related concepts like governance and these measures are used for a variety of research purposes and also for more applied work. In recent work for instance I've looked at how these measures can help us to think about pandemic response and sort of future resilience to crises. So there are a number of these measures, they're used a lot but I think for the most part with the exceptions of the several indicators that Matthias and colleagues talk about there hasn't been a huge amount of attention in the work to statistical capacity or informational capacity as they term it. So it could be interesting to think more about that in some of this measurement work. I have some sort of a soft spot here for this because many years ago I worked on a measure of governance called the Ibrahim Index of African Governance and we spent quite a bit of time playing around with the possibility of including a measure of statistical capacity in the index because there was so much missing data on these sort of basic things that we would expect states and states to have collected information on. And I think if Matthias' paper had been around then I would have pushed a bit harder for including this sort of indicator of statistical capacity in the index. I think Oliver and colleagues work asks a really broader and really ambitious question. In the article they seek to identify the institutional variables that influence the evolution of state capacity especially with reference to Sub-Saharan Africa and they find not surprisingly but I think importantly that effective governance seems to be important here. So there's a link in particular between equal distribution of resources which is positively associated with their measure of state of tax capacity and then corruption is negatively associated with tax capacity. So I think this is really important to show empirically. And then in the new paper they look at the other side of the relationship. So they find this relationship between tax and improved vertical accountability in terms of measured in terms of the quality of elections and party competition. So it really provides some empirical background to a lot of the discussion around fiscal bargain and social contracts and tax. I guess one question for Oliver and colleagues is why if they could tease out a bit more what the mechanisms might be and why they don't why they think they're not finding a relationship between tax and other measures of accountability. So in terms of for instance participation by a civil society or judicial the various judiciary measures that they look at and sort of what other measures of accountability they've looked at. You use those to tease out what this relationship is a bit more. And then Leander and James they present a really provocative argument that standard measures of state capacity focused on tax revenue as a share of national income are insufficient. In particular they fail to explain the Rwandan state which has had low tax capacity but clearly high capacity to do other things. And I think this is a very important point especially as so much of the research literature has used tax revenue as a share of national income as a proxy for state capacity. But then this leads to sort of a second set of comments. I think it would be interesting to reflect a bit perhaps especially with Leander's paper but maybe also with some of the others on the relationship between their argument these arguments and broader discussions about the state and different dimensions of state effectiveness and state strength. So I was struck in Leander and James's paper with the argument that Rwandan capacity isn't captured by conventional Vibrarian concepts and that they have this sort of new approach to the state measured in terms of social networks. And I suppose I was struck with what seemed to me to be a lot of overlap with some existing concepts of the state. So they mentioned in the introduction to the paper man's concept of infrastructural power of the state which is which sounded a lot to me like what they're talking about as state capacity or as networked state capacity as they discuss it. So man defines infrastructural capacity as the capacity of the state or sorry infrastructural power as the capacity of the state to penetrate and centrally coordinate the activities of civil society through their own infrastructure. This sounds a lot to me like what they've presented in the paper. So I'd be interested to hear why it's not and what's different. I also saw some overlap between discussion in the literature on the state on this distinction between state authority and capacity and legitimacy which we see in a lot of work including in some of my own. So in this you know if we distinguish these three things state authority would be the ability of the state to provide order and security within its boundaries state capacity to sort of get things done and then state legitimacy to have the consent of the population to govern and sort of the voluntary compliance of the population with rules and state actions. So if we use this sort of distinguishing of three dimensions of the state it sounds a lot to me I think we could tell a different story about the evidence that's presented in the article. So it sounds a lot to me like what they're showing is that historical state authority helps to explain contemporary state authority and contemporary rule compliance. So this is sort of I think the data and the argument is really interesting but I would tell a slightly different I would frame it slightly different and differently and I wonder what Leander would say about this interpretation of the results. Let's see I suppose broadly on this I would also then ask Oliver I was struck that in the first the opening presentation of the new paper that he sort of framed it in terms of providing evidence on a relationship between two indicators of state capacity tax capacity and accountability and I suppose I would frame it if we're thinking in terms of accountability capacity and legitimacy I would think about the papers making contribution more in terms of showing the relationship between fiscal capacity or state capacity and state legitimacy and then I want to state a time. Then the third set of points I think there's some really interesting implications here for aid and development cooperation and for discussions around aid and development cooperation with Matias and colleagues paper I was really struck that this is a really it sort of it offers really nice support for development partners attention to statistical capacity development that this is a really important thing not only because it's important to strengthen statistical capacity but also because support for statistical statistical capacity might have sort of knock on effects on other aspects of capacity in particular fiscal capacity. So I wonder Matias if the research offers any insight here are there sort of entry points where external actors could facilitate statistical capacity or informational capacity or is this based on your work is it much more of an endogenous process that's hard to influence externally and then relatedly what are the sort of time scales that you might be expecting in the development of informational capacity and in the relationship between informational capacity and fiscal capacity what how might we expect this to evolve and how long would we expect to wait for this to evolve. For Oliver and Abrams work I think in relation to the discussion on development cooperation you know there's been a lot of discussion about or I've done a lot of work on thinking about aid and governance and support for good governance reforms and so on and I think one really interesting implication that comes from the the working paper is that maybe a nice way to to support accountability and to sort of speak to the ongoing trends and in democratic backsliding is maybe paying more attention to fiscal capacity could be one way to do this and I would be interested in thoughts on that based on the work. I was also struck with with Oliver's and Abrams work on the sort of strange parallels between their argument and the the discussion about the aid institution's paradox and in work by by Todd Moss and Deborah Brodigam and Stephen Nock and others. So this work makes the argument that states that raise substantial revenues that get a lot of money from donors become less accountable to their citizens so they're more accountable to donors and less accountable to citizens. This is kind of the the converse of of what seems to be happening with with taxes and it was nice that you talked a bit Oliver in the presentation about the results on aid but I wonder if there's anything more there about this interplay between aid and tax and it might be interesting to pull out a bit more. So let me stop there I think I'm almost at 12 minutes. Why don't we just collect a few questions from the audience now and then I will give a couple of minutes or three to each of the panelists. You serve first then Tony please keep your questions or comments very short thanks. Thank you yes okay just keep on talking yes thanks a lot and fascinating papers also the comments from Rachel I think for a lot of food for thought I will limit myself to to the paper that Mattias presented and about actually it's about how you approach the issue and how you what how you operationalize the concept. So you say that fiscal capacity is the ability of states to mobilize revenues. Now I will ask the question that Oliver would ask to you when you measure fiscal capacity only using text to GDP ratio do you really measure fiscal capacity. So is this the dependent variable should you rather talk about the impact of information capacity on tax collection. Wouldn't that be more transparent and when you talk about information capacity doesn't the paper that Oliver presented to you speak also to that in that regard. I mean the underlying theory is that information on the preferences of citizens improves the capacity of the state to raise revenue and also to provide public services. A huge very important source of information is elections. So shouldn't you factor in elections and in this sense vertical accountability into your into your model. Thank you. Next question from Tony. So this is a question for Oliver but also a suggestion. I assume that the shock that you refer to is a terms of trade shock Oliver. And I know right the classic terms of trade shock or exchange rate shock. There's another type of shock which is a debt shock and this will be worth exploring probably in another paper because this relates to accountability that with the kinds of debt shocks that we see basically to repay your debt you have to allocate more revenue and decrease public spending on the good things that citizens and voters want. So that I suspect the accountability issue is different around a debt shock to a classic terms of trade shock. And this is you know has great contemporary relevance because Zambia Sri Lanka number of other countries are basically in a debt shock. So having built a fiscal capacity of the state including an ability to mobilize revenue that's actually now simply going to pay creditors and citizens are somewhat annoyed. Thank you. Thank you. I don't see any more questions. Oh one last one. It has to be very brief. Hi thank you for a very interesting panel. My name is Peter Ringstein with Norad and we work on the section for transparency and governance and we actually you mentioned policy implications and we try to support a sort of hollow government approach where we do support statistical services and revenue services. And yeah so this is very interesting. I just had two questions first to Oliver. It's interesting to see that the indirect taxes on accountability are as strong or stronger than direct taxes. My question is knowing that the tax base for direct taxes is so much more limited in a lot of African countries. Are you when you're looking at what sort of population you're actually talking about is it actually that the direct taxes is such a smaller part of the population that is involved in an election than the indirect taxes which is a much broader part of the population. And to Matias I think this legibility is extremely interesting and it's also interesting that it's coming from James Scott. It's actually a very cautionary tale about large transformative sort of efforts to make societies and ecosystems more legible for states. So before we sort of go into this sort of oh let's make everything more legible for states it would be interesting to hear you reflect a little bit about some some cautionary tales also there. Thank you. We have so many great questions and we have like six minutes but Leander I want to give the floor to you first. Could you respond to the questions particularly those that Rachel raised in like two minutes. Yes absolutely. Thank you Rachel for those points and very well taken. Yes there's been a little bit of you know how to put it like exponential growth in various capacities and words we use for aspects of the state and that's of course just you know a symptom of the fact that we haven't properly defined what we're after. Like in organizational economics there's a lot of work on what makes an organization effective and they don't really bother with words like capacity at all just that the organization is effective if it makes money. Now for the government that's much more difficult. Governments are different types of organizations and so we tend to have a word for each domain that a government is effective in. So the states try to influence the people that they normally govern. So you know we can call that infrastructural power. They raise money so we call this fiscal capacity. What we were trying to get at was something slightly different which is in all these concepts and all these terms the focal actor is sort of the Vibrarian state where the people in suits sitting in the capital getting a wage subject to laws and regulations. Now what we're trying to get at is that that definition is too narrow for basically every part of the world historically and some parts of the world today. So they're basically the boundaries between where do the people in suits and the states stop our non-congregation. So the state is much wider than the people that the state employs and the power that the state has is much broader than would be implied by taxes raised. So it's still the case that whichever definition of the state use it has all these capacities and powers and whatnot. But the point we're trying to make is that on the books state capacity may not always necessarily reflect real state capacity in a way that correlates with outcomes such that it makes social scientists care. Thanks Leander. If we had more time I would have asked you about leadership and Kagame. You know to the extent to which that actually also affects but we'll have to do this later on. I want to give the floor to Matthias. Thank you all for these these great questions and Rachel for your comments. I mean you're with respect to making this research actionable. I mean I would say I would answer with a qualified yes. I mean what what our findings support is yeah aid or development cooperation around yeah creating statistical capacity a statistics office yeah a comprehensive regular population censuses cadastral registry and so on. Yes I mean this these are avenues that I expected to have knock on effects but I qualify this because our historical case studies show that especially information gathering of land holdings and wealth needs elite compliance and so there you come to the limit limitations of this kind of quick fix. Okay so let's just sponsor the training of officials in conducting a population censuses and then everything will will go well yeah yes but there's also the issue of how do you get elite compliance is especially with revealing or making available information on their land only. Second Oliver your question is is well taken around yeah maybe I should yeah sort of a more tax collection rather than tax capacity but then the role of elections I think this speaks to the broader issue of the drivers of information capacity and we take we take it as an explanatory variable in this paper but I think this is an open avenue for future research like do we need to think about yeah the the drivers of information capacity in a different way or can we just apply mainstream theories of state formation and elections being part of that I think this is an open question. Excellent thank you Oliver. Thanks for all the questions and comments I'll try and be quick Tony really interesting point I think in terms of how it might affect taxation tax revenue we partly account for it in the way in which we measure the exchange rate shock because it could some of the debt could be include reserves and what's happening to reserve so it could pick up that but I think if somebody wanted a project to look at what you're really talking about then you really want to focus on public spending not tax revenue that would be the interesting thing that would be more challenging and the most fruitful way of that might be country case studies that you try to look at what's happening to distribute well you kind of pick it up maybe because we do have the equity of distribution resources so if that's changing that one should pick it up so it's worth thinking about it might it might be kind of hidden in there to some extent but I think if you really want to look at it you might want to be looking more or incorporating public spending of the allocation of public expenditure on Rachel's point aid and donors yeah I think they should pay more attention to fiscal and statistical and information capacity but to be fair to them they do you know Nara does you support that's why we're here you support a lot of fiscal capacity you're not the only donor that does that the World Bank has does an awful lot on the survey capacity and incorporating those things might be interesting but you couldn't do your long-term analysis with that IMF provides a lot of technical support so I think donors do do it and but I would agree in the sense that as their budgets as they reduce their budgets maybe that's the one area they shouldn't reduce keep funding surveys and statistical and fiscal capacity and informational capacity on your bigger question and partly incorporating Peter's question what are the underlying mechanism and why isn't it the other factors well one part of my answer is that I think electoral accountability is the most relevant for what we're looking at I fully appreciate the difficulties in kind of applying a median voter median taxpayer voter literature developed and tested for developed countries are democracies we're beginning to wonder a lot about these so-called praised democracies and developed countries and how good they are but in applying that to an African context but but it's still conceptually it's the underlying thing that matters because what what we're trying to capture is that if if voters feel that the tax they're paying is increasing then we expect them to to exert more pressure on the government to be accountable and the the way to do that is to try the protest to vote the way they can put that pressure is at least partly through the electoral process and through if not voting and particularly opposition parties and all of that so and there have been improvements in in vertical accountability so it is improving the other measure of accountability they don't have that same link judicial in particular doesn't doesn't have the same link to voter taxpayers looking for responsiveness the the horizontal that looks at kind of relationships between levels of government doesn't really the civil society one yes we don't find an effect there but I think it's partly because that particular accountability measure has very little variance over time whereas you know when we do look at determinants of vertical accountability yet the neopatrimonious and the media are very important so I suppose the good sign about it for us the work isn't over my final point on the aid one is I have to say this at wider every every time I do work looking at effects of aid on African countries whether it's governance or or whatever growth or whatever it's not necessarily what I'm looking for but I always seem to find a positive effect and that's something I share in common with Fintar he always find a positive effect as well thank you very much so we've run out of time we have municipal and district level elections in Norway on Monday and one of the big issues in Oslo is the opposition party the biggest opposition party saying they're going to scrap property taxes in Oslo so this is a huge issue the second thing you know it was really nice to hear Jim Scott's name being mentioned he's my mentor he's just gone through a severe illness he's recovering so we hope that he recovers very quickly thank you Leander for staying up or maybe you should go to bed now thank you very much for your participation Matias Oliver and Rachel and to all of you thank you very much