Low levels of domestic revenue are a key barrier to financing development in Sub-Saharan Africa, where the share of revenue to GDP can be as low as less than 10% (e.g., Chad, Niger, Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo). The tax effort—measured as the tax-to-GDP ratio—is 20 percentage points lower in Sub-Saharan Africa than the average for OECD countries.

Progress and remaining gaps:

Although progress has been made over the last ten years toward increasing total revenue, most African countries still lag well behind other countries with similar levels of development.

Paper objective:

This paper examines the latest trends in Uganda’s tax revenues in the context of reforms that have taken place over the last 30 years or so. By comparing Uganda’s taxation with that of other comparator countries in the region, the paper allows a more in-depth understanding of why it is the case that some countries have much larger ratios of tax revenue to GDP than others, or produce better outcomes for certain tax categories in general.