IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/idq/ictduk/18396.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Does Collecting Taxes Erode the Accountability of Informal Leaders? Evidence from the DRC

Author

Listed:
  • Bergeron, Augustin
  • Kabue Ngindu, Elie
  • Tourek, Gabriel
  • Weigel, Jonathan L.

Abstract

Delegating tax collection to informal leaders could raise tax revenue but runs the risk of undermining the local accountability of those leaders. We investigate this trade-off by exploiting whether city chiefs in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) were randomly assigned to collect property taxes in 2018. To measure accountability, we study the other side of the social contract: the distribution of resources by chiefs in a government cash transfer programme in which they had discretion over the recipients of development aid. In line with the preferences of citizens, chiefs who collected taxes allocated more programme benefits to poorer households and thus made fewer inclusion and exclusion errors. They were no more or less likely to pocket benefits themselves or allocate them to their families. Across a range of measures, citizens appear to have updated their beliefs of chiefs who collected taxes. We provide evidence that collector chiefs allocated aid to poorer households because door-to-door tax collection created opportunities to learn which households were in greatest need. In contrast to concerns of ‘decentralised despotism,’ the paper thus finds evidence of a chief’s accountability benefiting from delegating tax responsibilities to local leaders in low-capacity states.

Suggested Citation

  • Bergeron, Augustin & Kabue Ngindu, Elie & Tourek, Gabriel & Weigel, Jonathan L., 2024. "Does Collecting Taxes Erode the Accountability of Informal Leaders? Evidence from the DRC," Working Papers 18396, Institute of Development Studies, International Centre for Tax and Development.
    • Handle: RePEc:idq:ictduk:18396
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://opendocs.ids.ac.uk/opendocs/handle/20.500.12413/18396
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Finance;

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:idq:ictduk:18396. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: CATS administrator (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.ids.ac.uk/project/international-centre-for-tax-and-development .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.