Book review: Tax Matters by Paolo Mauro

Source details

Review author: PAOLO MAURO, director of the Economic and Market Research Department at the International Finance Corporation.
Publication: F&D Magazine; March 2024.
Reviewed work: A Taxing Journey: How Civic Actors Influence Tax Policy, Paolo de Renzio (ed.), Bloomsbury Academic, New York, NY, 2024, 240 pp., $103.50; or free open access at Bloomsbury Collections - A Taxing Journey.
Reading time note from source: Less than a minute(0 words) Read.
Central appraisal: The book "breaks new ground" on how civic actors influence tax reforms and documents case studies across countries at various stages of economic and institutional development.

Guatemala: A technically sophisticated group of former public officials held an opaque and ineffective tax administration to account.
Mexico: A CSO put a halt to tax amnesties.
Philippines: A campaign for higher taxes on alcohol and tobacco.
Kenya–Mauritius: A pan-African research and advocacy organization used the courts to delay an agreement between Kenya and Mauritius on avoidance of double taxation (which, according to some, would have led to more, rather than less tax avoidance).
Uganda: A campaign against a tax on mobile money transfers and on the use of social media.
United States (state-level): Three campaigns in Massachusetts, Maine, and Minnesota seeking to increase taxes on the wealthy.
France: The yellow vest (gilets jaunes) movement, triggered by an increase in fuel taxes shortly after the repeal of a wealth tax; noted as an outlier due to protest nature and associated violence but informative for comparison.

Civic actors can influence tax policy but rarely achieved complete success in terms of quality or durability of outcomes.
Civic actors do not always pursue policies that a professional economist would consider efficient; in some cases, it is unclear whether proposed policies would lead to greater equality or fairness.
Valuable elements identified across cases:
- How civic actors constructed narratives and built alliances.
- Occasional leveraging of domestic institutions, such as the courts.
- The role of technical expertise as an ingredient for success—successful CSOs either had former public finance officials in their ranks or collaborated with organizations, legislators with expert staff, or government officials.
Messaging, politics, and technical expertise are all necessary components and require time to develop.

The book is part of a broader rethinking about tax policy that moves away from excessive emphasis on economic efficiency and recognizes that fairness is central to voter concerns.
The volume demonstrates that civic actors can push for more equitable taxation or resist inequitable taxation.
The editors acknowledge selection bias: cases were selected because they were successful, at least in part; the objective was not to establish causality and failures were deliberately omitted.
Intended audience and purpose: To inspire activists, practitioners, and researchers to propose equitable tax reforms and to conduct further analysis on how and when civic actors can influence tax policy and make it fairer.

Readers expecting methodologically tight analysis and conclusive results will be disappointed.
The book offers balanced narratives on informative episodes rather than systematic causal inference or lessons from failures.

Source: Book review: Tax Matters by Paolo Mauro, F&D Magazine, March 2024.

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