Suchergebnisse

With the global sustainable development goals, it has become imperative for developing countries, especially sub-Saharan African countries, to think inward on ways to increase domestically mobilized revenue. The recovery of the global economy within the last few years has increased foreign assistance inflow into African countries. However, the direction of its impact on domestic mobilized revenue is unclear. This study revisited the relationship between foreign aid and domestic mobilized revenues for 32 sub-Saharan African countries using a more recent and novel dataset on tax revenue. We employed instrumental fixed effect Quantile regression, a novel technique in aid and tax revenue literature. The study's findings show that the impact of foreign aid varies across tax revenue distribution. We found a negative and significant effect in countries with high tax effort. While the effect is insignificant in countries with low tax effort, sub-Saharan African countries, especially those with low tax revenue, need to use foreign aid to strengthen their tax administration and adopt modern tax revenue collection technologies. As a result, sub-Saharan African countries should request advanced countries or donors to provide technical support in tax revenue mobilization.

The human capital crisis, reflected in the weak global competitiveness of African education, has questioned the effectiveness of public spending in increasing educational outcomes in the continent. Thus, this article examines the impact of government education expenditure on educational outcomes in 31 sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries from 2000-2019 based on a Generalized Method of Moments (GMM). The study sheds light on the priorities of government education spending in the continent. Findings showed that the effect of government education spending on educational outcomes in SSA was driven by the measure of educational outcome used. Government spending in Africa had focused mainly on primary and secondary education to the detriment of tertiary education because it is convenient and generates political gains. Due to institutional rigidities which emanate from the governance structure, the inequitable allocation of government funding had made higher education in Africa less responsive to the changes in global knowledge and labour market demands. Therefore, the following policy agenda becomes imperative in the SSA: (i) government education spending should equitably target all education levels to improve the aggregate human capital development indicators in the region. (ii) There is a need to enhance government institutions' capacity to increase their level of effectiveness and performance.

The literature has been awash with alternative explanations for structural and economic transformation in more recent years. Growth drivers are myriad in empirical depictions and enquiries into deeper causal relationships has preoccupied development discourse. Particularly, the contributory role of tourism development in job creation, thereby increasing the standard of living, national output, foreign exchange earnings and revenue to the government through taxation have been brought into sharper view by extant studies. To this end, the developmental gains arising from expansion of activities in the tourism industry has equally blossomed. This is particularly the case in Africa owing on one hand to the high influx of tourists into the continent as well as the relative size of tourism receipts to gross domestic product (GDP) for key continental destinations on the other hand. Hence, the central question is how has tourism development influenced overall economic development in the African context? To pursue this train of inquisition, this study examined the effect of tourism development on human capital development in Africa. Precisely, the study uncovered the role of tourism in influencing human capital development using data on a panel of twenty-five (25) African countries covering the period from 1998 to 2014. System General Moment Method (GMM) estimation techniques was deployed in the study in a requisite bid to account for endogeneity and unlike previous work human capital is decomposed into education and health to facilitate clearer understanding on the specificity of the impacts of tourism development in the economy. The study findings showed that tourism development vis-à-vis tourist arrival and tourism receipt had positive and significant effect on human capital development in Africa. This result is found to be robust to the choice of human capital indicator albeit with certain variations contingent on model specification. Thus, appropriate policies that will make the continent's tourist sites attractive to tourists need to be implemented.