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Séminaire d’économie de Bordeaux
Sandrine Mesplès-Somps
(LEDa-DIAL, IRD, Université Paris Dauphine PSL)
Decolonization of state capacity? Public revenues and expenditures from colonial times to present, evidence from former French colonies
Co-authors: Denis Cogneau, Yannick Dupraz, Justine Knebelmann
Abstract: The ability of a government to raise taxes and the strategies deployed to do so are a core feature of state capacity. For this reason, the history of taxation is narrowly intertwined with that of state-building. Surprisingly, the capacity of states to provide public services is hardly ever considered an important dimension of state building. We question to what extent the dismantlement of the French empire in Africa that occurred between 1956 and 1962 through decolonization was a major overhaul of the state’s identity and practices. Over a few months’ time the legitimacy to raise tax revenue shifts from metropolitan France to newly formed independent governments that became autonomous in defining budgetary orientations. Little is known about how this in-depth political transition affected the level and composition of fiscal revenue and public expenditure, notably because of the scarcity of information on the public finances of African countries between independence and the 1980s. In this paper, we reconstruct the fiscal trajectories of eighteen former French colonies in Africa spanning years 1900-2018, linking colonial and post-colonial decades with an unprecedented level of detail on the composition of tax revenue. We also produce indicators on budgetary policies. We find that very few countries achieved significant progress in fiscal capacity between the end of the colonial period and today, if we set aside income drawn from mineral resources. This is not explained by a lasting collapse of fiscal capacity at the time of independence. On the other hand, at the time of independence, we observe notable changes in budgetary orientations, particularly an acceleration of public spending on education and general administrative services. The structural adjustment programmes clearly stopped this dynamic. The orientations towards more education spending required by the objectives of sustainable development only allow for catching up with the levels already reached at the end of the 1970s.