 Good morning. I'm a professor, of course, so good morning. Okay, first, thank you, Patricia, for organizing this session. My colleague at Baruch College, Zach Manfilie, works a lot on rebel taxation and would have liked to be here. But I'm happy to be here at my first wider conference and appreciate the initiatives that try to bridge the gap between policymakers and academics. Today our main goal is to emphasize the importance of including the behavior of non-state actors. In our understanding of the total tax landscape for people living in conflict areas, we just heard about this a bit. We urge policymakers and aid organizations to take a more expansive approach in recognizing that armed non-state actors may sometimes improve on state tax systems. And as Patricia mentioned in the beginning, we've heard already in two cases may provide public and private services and goods. Further, we support a multidisciplinary approach when looking at these sort of issues, recognizing that both in Zach's case and my case, he's a political scientist. I'm an economist. We often have limitations in our own discipline as we're looking at these issues. So a few key framing questions. Patricia mentioned earlier that the work that we're putting together is kind of a broad way to, like a conceptual framework, a way to think about this more broadly and kind of forge a path forward in terms of where the research should be going in this area. Some key framing questions are what are the limits of existing state-centric approaches to setting taxation and conflict? What are some of the shortcomings of disciplinary approaches? Can incorporating the behavior of non-state actors improve our understanding of the impact of conflict on household well-being? And how would shifting the debate from state taxation to include all forms of taxation during conflict impact the behavior of the international community? So Patricia mentioned a few of these things already. A lot of people live in conflict-affected areas. And the World Bank that has, I'll show you a designation of fragile and conflict environments that they do every year, say that by 2030, the majority of the extreme poor in the world will live in those areas. Moreover, conflict has gone from being interstate over the decades to more interstate conflict where these non-state actors, like rebels and surgeons, militias have a lot more presence and are engaged on the ground. This is in contrast to gangs and other criminal organizations and cartels that may be operating in even non-fragile and non-conflict states. These armed non-state actors are more involved over time, have been involved in governance, and that's what we're going to be talking about a little bit now. Some of the literature that has looked at conflict and taxation has said that interstate wars have improved support for taxes, but that interstate and civil wars may actually kind of do the opposite because of increases in polarization. So here's an example just of some of the World Bank's classification of conflict situations and fragile situations. They define fragile situations as systemic condition or situation characterized by an extremely low level of institutional and governance capacity, which significantly impedes the state's ability to function effectively, maintain peace, and foster economic and social development. As we've heard for the past day and a half, institutions are critical to thinking about up revenue, and this is a challenge in fragile and conflict environments. Importantly, in the literature, sometimes scholars don't always separate these two different environments, fragile and conflict, but in terms of thinking of policy implications, they can be quite different. So a quick note on definitions. I'm going to use the word conflict very broadly, but in each of the papers that we're referring to in the literature, often there's like a specific definition for conflict or for taxation, so it's important to keep in mind. Now the main goal here is to describe this conceptual framework and think about kind of revenue on one hand and expenditures on the other hand, then I'm going to give you an example from Yemen, because some of the work I'm doing at the moment is on Yemen, and then I'll finish up with some kind of implications and guiding questions. So this conceptual framework, we want to start by thinking of tax revenues in fragile states. We can imagine, for example, in fragile environments, a lot of potential revenue being lost to bureaucratic efficiencies, to corruption, to other things like that, and so we have this potential total tax revenue, right, and then we have the realized tax revenue. This is in fragile environments as opposed to, for example, stable environments, right. Then we add in the conflict state, and so here we're thinking of similar corruption and efficiencies and similar, you know, this realized tax revenue, but there's also this loss of a revenue base, and we've heard a little bit about from the beginning what conflict does to local economic activity. There's also the loss of territory and many other ways. Government is spending money now on, you know, on more military instead of some of the administrative services, and so there's this loss of revenue base. And what we propose is, you know, this middle section is more of a state-centric approach, and in this conference, of course, I think, as Patricia said in the beginning, we take for granted that we're talking about a place where the state is functioning at a decent level and we're trying to rev up this revenue and domestic revenue in a functioning environment. Here, when we have conflict states and we incorporate non-state actors, what we want to think about is, you know, how some of the loss of the revenue base that is happening on the state side, it's actually going towards realized non-state tax revenue. And we heard some examples here just now in the context of Columbia, which, you know, has to do with both criminal organizations but in the past has to do with FARC as well and how some of that money is going in that direction. So here we're just thinking of kind of the tax revenue side, but we also want to think about the expenditure side, right? Actually, before I leave this slide, let me say one more thing that we've already talked about how businesses and I guess there are citizens in certain places pay the people who are in charge, right? The people who are on the ground who are, for example, giving protective services and whatnot. And so sometimes households and firms are taxed, you know, predation and extortion. We'll talk about that in a moment, but they're taxed based on where they are operating in, let's say, rebel territory or in state-run territory. Sometimes when goods, for example, are transported across a long area or a large area, then they have double taxation. So the first part of this framework recognizes that individuals and firms pay more than just state taxes. The next part considers how this is spent. So again, we have the fragile environments and the conflict states and then the two different kind of state-centric approaches versus non-state actors here. And so here on the left, we think about kind of ideal expenditure for a fragile state where they're doing these social services and then other necessary expenditures like defense and interest payments. And then here we think about getting rid of that lost revenue, right? So we have the realized revenue in the state. And you can see here, let's imagine that defense, the box is a little larger, but the reality is that social services have gone down, right, during a conflict area for all the reasons I named. And in the right-most box, we can think of that lost revenue again as actually going into some total revenue if we think again about how non-state actors are bringing in some of the money and then they're spending it. So some of it, of course, is in the top box where they're spending it on military campaigns, but some of it is actually the non-state services. Here we're extrapolating and sorry, we are abstracting from things like borrowing, from things like aid and international organizations which may be on the ground and doing some of these social services. This is kind of a basic framework that we're hoping to develop and think about in the context of specific sectors depending on the country. So there are many challenges to identification and estimation in this area. In the interest of time, I'm going to come back to this later if I have time when I finish this out. But as we know from the discussions here, it's really hard to do research in conflict areas. There's always a paucity of data in these areas and there are a lot of other factors coming in which makes it challenging and that's why I think the multidisciplinary approaches are really important here. So I'm going to quickly go through some of the literature on taxation by state actors and non-state actors. Broadly when we think about state taxation, of course it impacts state building, capacity building. These institutions can in turn affect the ability to tax and within fragile environments already, these systems are being very strained. Akitobi and colleagues at the IMF examined tax revenues in developing countries from 2000 to 2017 and find that fragile countries revenues were about 12% of GDP. That's about four to six percentage points less than non-fragile environments. And of course when conflict breaks out, then there are all these other mechanisms. I've mentioned some of them before, you've heard some of them from my colleagues. But there are many different ways that conflict affects the tax space for the government. And again, that's kind of part of our conceptual framework is just to think of those different mechanisms and recognize which scholars have already done the impact of conflict on state capacity and taxation. And what we want to bring in now is the other side, right? So first I'm going to start by talking about governance more broadly by armed non-state actors. Here scholars have shown, as I mentioned, this is some of the work actually my colleague, both Zach and also Desmond Arias, both at Baruch. They've increasingly studied rebel and criminal organizations as governance actors and a wide variety of nonviolent actions. I mentioned that they provide services and public goods. They also deploy symbolic actions to establish larger social order. And while often viewed as extortion, non-state groups commonly levy taxes in a predictable and structured manner. Rebels seek to define, engage, regulate and control civilian populations and commercial actors through tax systems. Now again, note that in these areas, we do often find unarmed non-state actors. I mentioned NGOs, international organizations. These groups are often providing social and humanitarian services, but they're typically taxed as well to be able to go into these zones, right? So it's not that they're there and they're not engaging while international organizations may not always want to, you know, publicize how they're engaging on the ground in these areas. They are getting protection to be able to get into zones that are under rebel control. So as an example of these structured quote unquote taxes, we have a few receipts that Zach shared from Nagaland, which is a state in Northeast India. This is from the National Socialist Council of Nagaland. It was one of the main rebel groups operating in this area. And what you see here is some tax receipts. And Zach really liked where they said, you know, received with thanks, you know. And this is the full receipt. And here's an example of one of their officials. He said paying tax to NSCN is in itself a political demonstration of indicating that Naga people pay tax to the Naga government and not to the occupying force. And that occupying force is the Indian government. So that's just an example. I'm going to show you another example from Yemen in a moment. So this literature on taxation by non-state actors is quite nascent, but is growing. As I mentioned, some of my colleagues have done a lot of work in this area. First, there is evidence that both how individuals and firms view and experience taxation and how scholars understand taxation are impacted by historical, political, and cultural lenses. This is really important if we think back to yesterday's early discussion and the afternoon's plenary as well, where we're thinking about how, you know, citizens can maybe mobilize, right, to think about having their voice and pushing for more transparency and things like that. And so it's really important to think about how individuals and firms experience taxation and to look at the total tax landscape for them, right? So many scholars use this term extortion or predation when non-state actors receive money from, thank you, from local population, which implies it's like unpredictable uses of force for such collection. However, as Kenton's note, non-state actors could have, quote, unquote, more predictable administrative processes than tax and customs systems in their own countries. Finally, over time, non-state actors may not just, you know, expand on these systems. They may identify new sorts of revenue, adopt more efficient practices, be less corrupt, be seen as less corrupt than the state, and maybe, you know, as Patricia mentioned, more legitimate in some ways, and they may shift from more military goals to political goals. I'm just going to highlight a couple of key things from Yemen. I'm doing some work on conflict, displacement and food security in Yemen at the moment. In particular, some of the main groups there, the Houthis, they took over the capital Sana in 2014 and then in March 2015 with regional international forces came an escalation of violence and airstrikes and other kind of military campaigns. And we've been, you know, they've been in violence ever since. There was a large contraction in GDP. We talked a bit or we heard about yesterday some of like the importance of natural resources in some countries. Oil, for example, or production in Yemen, dropped a lot before this crisis in 2013. It was like 60% of fiscal revenue came from the state oil production. That made up about 13% of GDP in 2013 and that dropped to about 3% of GDP in 2015. So we have these different key actors. The Houthis have about one-third of the territory in Yemen, but about 70% of the population of 33 million live in that territory. And so, you know, the internationally recognized government, for example, some of the issues that came up, they couldn't tax during this process. You know, this resulted in lack of basic services. Also, they didn't kind of pay their government workers. They started printing money to cover the budget, but that resulted in a currency crisis. So there were these many spiraling things. Airblocks and sea blockades had massive impact on supply chains, et cetera, et cetera. You can imagine kind of over the past decade or, you know, six, seven years how this has been. The Houthis do a lot of taxing. So they tax and confiscate goods and they divert aid. Houthis, quote unquote, have increased tax revenue from tax selection by 500% compared to pre-war tax revenue. So now some of these, just to say again, you know, the data here, we're going to think about triangulating different sources, right? So any one source, of course, is going to be biased in many ways. And everyone there in Yemen has a reason to maybe lie about what, you know, both the government side and the Houthis as well. But so we have this quote, you know, some quotes from some of the researchers who are there. Gradually, the Houthis developed some capabilities, although limited, within service delivery, such as the provision of electricity, water, and limited educational and health services. So here are some quick examples, two minutes, yeah. Okay, here are some quick, just examples of, again, some receipts in Yemen, some quote unquote donations, right, that they have putting out that money there. Here's a vaccination campaign to COVID. Initially the Houthis were saying there was putting out a lot of misinformation saying that there's no COVID. Eventually the acquiesce, they let the World Health Organization come in and do some vaccinations and, okay, so for the last two minutes, I just want to talk about kind of the multidisciplinary approach and some questions to leave us at when we move forward in this area. I think what's really important here is using complementary methodologies. We've already heard some of them today using both qualitative and quantitative methods, thinking about econometric models and the broader scale, but also kind of detailed case studies. And again, using things like key informant interviews and participant observation, given that we don't have great data sources, especially on the non-state armed actors. So I'm going to focus on these three, excuse me, four different boxes, thinking about some questions to keep in mind. So from a legal perspective, for example, we might want to consider issues like when civilians pay taxes to armed groups that could sometimes legally be considered material support for terrorism. There are also questions about, for example, post-conflict when there are land rights issues and citizens have been paying rebels but not the state, and afterwards, do they have, you know, what rights do they have to that land? Our economic approach as being an economist, I can say that we have many strengths, but one weakness is that if we can't measure things well, sometimes we don't measure them at all, and I think that it's really important to think about some of the assumptions and question some of the assumptions that economists make on armed actors. From a political perspective, we want to consider how governance can be thought of as a technology, and when we think about the legacies of taxation regimes and they carry on after conflict, how to incorporate some of perhaps the benefits of what rebels have brought into these contexts. Finally, from a social perspective, it's critical to think about the implications for local communities and consider, again, citizens' attitudes towards non-state taxation. Finally, I know I've got less than a minute. I think I've said most of these things. I just want to highlight one or two questions to leave us with. During conflicts, we want to think about how to avoid double taxation, so civilian and commercial actors are not forced to pay multiple times. This could be useful for them during this period, and how to design agricultural and export commodity prices that do not exacerbate, for example, the divisions happening during war. Post-conflict, we want to think about, as I mentioned, the legacies of taxation regimes, whether the state is in power afterwards or, for example, in Afghanistan, where the Taliban is now in charge, to think about kind of what novel practices there could be to, again, rev up revenue. Finally, how should national governments and international actors deal with taxes paid to rebel groups? Again, this is something that we can take away from in this conference and thinking about how to broaden our approach, especially for thinking about those 2 billion people who live in areas that are afflicted by conflict. Thank you very much.