April 26, 2021

Forum Podcast “Can Taxes Improve Politics?” – with Jonathan Weigel

Guest: Jonathan Weigel, Assistant Professor of International Development at LSE

In this episode, Dr. Jonathan Weigel of the London School of Economics discusses his work on taxation and state capacity with Forum Affiliate Morgan Wack. Throughout the episode Jonathan discusses his work aimed at improving the efficacy of tax collection efforts alongside officials in the DRC. He details the “participation dividend” that can accrue through expanded collection efforts as well as the potential benefits of utilizing local elites to target the households that are both most willing and most able to pay their property taxes. They also discuss the role of digitization and new technologies in transforming how taxes are levied and collected in low capacity states. 

Jonathan’s mentioned and upcoming work:

Jonathan’s paper on the participation dividend in Congo: The participation dividend of taxation: How citizens in Congo engage more with the state when it tries to tax them

Jonathan’s working paper on the role of local elites in tax collection: Local elites as state capacity: How city chiefs use local information to increase tax compliance in the D.R. Congo (with Pablo Balan, Augustin Bergeron, and Gabriel Tourek)

An outline for Jonathan’s work on digitization and informal taxation: Formalizing informal taxation: Evidence from the D.R. Congo (with Augustin Bergeron and Gabriel Tourek)

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