Tax Policy Transfer to Developing Countries: Politics, Institutions and Experts

Tax ideas have always been transferred across borders. However, since the early 1980s, the transfer of tax ideas has had an increased global significance. Many have identified the 1980s as a global ‘decade of tax reform’.3 To some, this signalled the generation of global tax norms,4 or a ‘remarkable consensus’ of experts reflecting a ‘virtual revolution in applied tax policies in developed, developing and transition economies’.5 Others have suggested that ‘the tax systems of the major developed countries, if not all countries, will increasingly tend to resemble each other’.6 These global developments in tax reform were spurred by two significant shifts in the broader economic context. First, the 1980s was ‘a decade of economic crisis for many developing countries and slow growth for industrialized countries’.7 Second, and partly in response to this crisis, the 1980s saw the ascendance of a neo-liberal paradigm which advocated export-led growth and a free market economy, understood as a reduction of the engagement of the state in economic development. Many developing countries undertook structural adjustment reforms under this new paradigm, as a condition of loans and aid from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank and major country donors such as the United Kingdom.