The Fiscal State in Africa: Evidence from a century of growth
Why do large differences in fiscal capacity exist between states in the Global South? We constructa comprehensive new dataset of tax and revenue collection for 46 African polities from 1900 to2015. Descriptive analyses show that many polities in Africa have been characterized by stronggrowth in real tax collection. As a next step, we employ these data to test theories of fiscal capac-ity in a long