 Okay, thank you. Thank you Peter for your nice introduction and Thank you colleagues in the the audience for choosing this session over over the others Let me upload my presentation Let me open my presentation. It should be Is it this one no, it's you it's you I've got it here now There we go, okay Here it is So these I'll use The the 20 minutes or less than the 20 minutes. Hopefully I have to give you an overview of our Workstream on We call it fiscal states in developing economies. So this is a work screen where I've been one of the key researchers together with Kunal and With a team of wonderful colleagues from political science and economics but this is probably a simplification because we were much more diverse than that and I'll give an overview of what we did the logic behind it what we were trying to achieve and why we think is important for a Domestic resources mobilization, but it's essentially we talk about taxation here but from a different perspective from The perspective of the structural conditions needed to develop taxation So that's where we are going and this is our web page. Well, the project is you will find all the information about the project and the outputs We have benefited from Wonderful collaboration with colleagues at the OECD Development Center and I see Alexander here. Thank you Thank you to Federico Bonaglia as well for supporting us along the way and for engaging with us on this project a Little bit of a background on this We all agree that it's not too difficult to identify needs for public spending so states play an important role and Especially from a developing economy point of view are crucial actors not just for economic but for human development improvement, but the question is how do we finance this and Taxes are what you need at least the modern states are complex machines that rely largely on Taxation, but where does this come from? Where does taxation come from in particular? The economic historians use the term fiscal states to indicate that you got to Research and understand the long-term process behind it the long-term process of a transformation of public finance institutions that to lead you from Let's say less advanced to modern forms of taxation like Broad-based taxation income tax for example and That's how we chose the term and that's where we we try to fit. This is policy relevant We all agree in a development conference. It's about a stg's and in particular stg1. So This is agreed. What is less agreed and that's the academic side of what we are trying to do is a Um We have studied the origins of taxation But the academic debate on this and what we have read is mostly about Advanced economies how this happened how the emergence of taxation fiscal capacity Happened in the West especially It's less clear How whether this will happen and how this can happen in a less developed economy context So from this point of view we try to to you know to to fit into debate. That's how we are coming in Let me show you a little bit of data on this To motivate a little bit further you will see Standard variables it's Total resource taxes over GDP from our own in-house Dataset at you and you wider and you have here the split on the left by income level and on the right to the split by region What we see it's probably what you have seen before the obvious fact that the advanced economies collect a lot less In terms of revenue compared to a lot more compared to less developed economies. That's okay And if you do this by region you get more or less the same result the regions of the world where the advanced economies are Do a lot better in terms of tax tax performance as measured here What is less obvious and we are here we covered the period between 2020 1995 What is less obvious, but I think we see this is interesting is that this gap over time is unchanged so essentially the gap in Total revenues where GDP is stable whether you look at it by region by income levels for us that was a starting point because it suggests in a way that deeper structural determinants of Taxation and tax systems can be important here and in particular history politics institutions May explain this persistence over time of a gaps in gaps in a large gaps in tax collection so Why is this important for at least three reasons and You know they developing tax systems developing fiscal capacity as we use all this term borrowing from the recent literature on this is a Gives you at least you know the three reason to be more hopeful in terms of development Once one is because going back to the early point I made taxation allows you to spend and in particular Again stylized facts. This is a health spending standard the World Bank variables We see here in the split by region that then The same regions that we have seen before tax more are also those that tend to spend more on health in particular in this case Second reason and This is perhaps also not emphasize enough if you learn how to tax You also have access to powerful redistributive tools Brose based taxation income taxes in particular Give you our access to you know it allow you to develop a progressive taxation and that can have a really powerful redistributive impact so and Third reason and that's a you know that that's something also perhaps that should be emphasized more we learn from from the field of fiscal sociology That the learning to tax may come with a governance dividend the so-called governance dividend So once you start taxing any way of broad based taxation in particular Citizens industry will react to that will tend to keep Governments more accountable and governments will respond in return Hopefully so developing a virtuous cycle of a improved improved governance Okay This is perhaps something that has not Happened so far in less developed economy and this is probably this is I think the last Figure I'm going to show you. This is a standard voice and accountability index from world governance indicators Plot this over time in our income low-income economies. What you observe here is that Essentially, there is a large gap between the two types of economies and this is again unchanged over time probably reflecting the fact that our governance dividend has not happened in In a less developed economy context because there is something missing on in terms of taxation and learning how to tax What have we done from the academic side the main output a special issue of the journal of institutional economics So and at this point, I should thank the editors of the journal because it was a Really rewarding experience working with them The journal was very supportive and in particular the editor in chief Jeffrey Odson were supportive from the start of This project bringing together So such a diverse group of academics These are the papers listed here. The good thing is that this is open access We believe in making research open to everyone. So it's all there For you to download free of charge The highlights on this how can I give you in one slide what we actually found from this special issue? essentially three things history Politics and institutions matter all three of them So simplifying a little bit But probably I'm not doing justice to each of the papers because They had a much richer content and findings that I'm putting it that I can possibly put in a slide I would say on the political side. We found that Political institutions Holding, you know placing institutionalized limits on the executive matter on the executive power matter we also found that Politics matter in the sense that Taxation that can happen an often income tax has been to be introduced as one of the papers by Per Anderson shows in No democratic context where there are more informal mechanisms that keep like legislatures that keep rulers into account on The institutional determinant side there are at least three papers here that have been important in sense Abrams again, and Oliver Morris a work on taxation tax performance on Africa and find that mechanisms of accountability matter and then another set of papers finds that To develop taxation so to learn how to tax you may need other institutions that complement that and on this I don't want to you know, I don't want to spoil it, but Marina is going to say more about this in a bit on the importance of having Property rights in place at the same time as a as developing taxation and Tomorrow because the discussion on this will go on tomorrow Mattias from how we'll tell you what he finds In terms of the complementarity of a the ability of a state to collect information as a Compliment for for a taxation on the historical side and here I finish with the highlights from the special issue Oh, they'll get will tell us more What they find in Uganda and in particular pre-colonial history may be important And tomorrow Leander Helding and James Robinson had a paper on on Rwanda Instead arguing that history matters there, but in a different sense because The ability of elites and how elites historically developed was an obstacle to develop States and state capacity as we We intended these days so There is plenty for For those interested on this to to read and I hope you will read the special issue and we'll hear more from Authors today and tomorrow at the actually the papers But I want to tell you a little bit more in the next few minutes instead. What do we learn? What do we think we learn from this? so some lessons It's always, you know difficult when you do this type of research then to translate it into Policy prescriptions, so I wouldn't say these are actually prescriptions But I would say we learn something to be aware of if you want to develop fiscal states if you want to develop Public finance institutions and taxation in particular So the first finding Rome wasn't built in a day. We are arguing here that Effectively, this is a long-term process. It may sound obvious, but it's not Always obvious to those actually engaged in policy That the taxation is not something that happens overnight We often tend to focus on What revenue administrations do when the public economists can teach me a lot on this and that's what we should be doing What we are saying here is that at the same time we have to be aware that the deep structural conditions Can facilitate or not the task of revenue administrations can support or not their functioning so in a way if you want to take this one step further the Rome wasn't built in and in a day statement is a While you develop taxation, it's inevitable that you have to rely also on other sources of finance Include in it. We are simply saying stay the course on this and You know keep going because it's a long-term in process a long-term process similarly history matters, that's the second lesson we learn Here the message is you have to be aware that If in some parts of an economy in some regions tax compliance, for example, it's not as strong as you would like it to be Look at also our history play the role there and Again, you know, this is about Odell gas and Merima Ali's paper what happened in Uganda Understanding these mechanisms may help to explain, you know understanding our history plays may help you to explain why a reform works or doesn't work and next we argue Politics matters and this is about the political environment both from an informal point of view that the The mechanisms understanding how elites keep each other's in check, but also from formal mechanisms We argue Kunal Abrams and myself in our paper that Formal mechanisms of constraints on the executive can create the conditions for Investing in tax systems. And if you want to put to the politics matter claim in the SDG language You can say this is where there is a Definitely a point, you know a connection between SDG 16 about accountable institutions and SDG 17 and finally Do not look at fiscal capacity. So a taxation in isolation because we learn from Marina and Michelle Darcy's paper and we learn from Matias Paper he laughs and Jose Perez Kajias paper that you need other things in place If we at the same time if you want to support the process of learning from that over learning to tax I Think I'm done. That's all I have for now. So I finished even earlier Thank you