Authors: Jamal Msami, Lucas Katera and Marianne S. Ulriksen
Published: PSRB Working Paper
A spate of wide-reaching tax reforms in Tanzania in 2016 provided a unique opportunity to study the subsequent revenue bargaining between government and different revenue providers. Selecting cases where we expected revenue providers and government to engage in negotiations over tax reforms, we inductively explored the following question: how do targeted revenue providers and the government arrive at bargained outcomes? Through our qualitative analysis we identified three sites (arenas), with distinct characteristics and power dynamics, where revenue and political actors
engaged in bargaining: the public, bureaucratic and political arenas. Findings from fieldwork in addition suggested that the arena for negotiations shaped the strategies used by the parties, which subsequently affected the final policy outcome (i.e., whether the government made concessions to
the revenue providers or not). The paper informs a chapter in the forthcoming book: Politics of Revenue Bargaining in Africa, Oxford University Press.