Taxing Informality: Compliance and Policy Preferences in Urban Zambia

Urban Informality: Toward an Epistemology of Planning

Many of the significant urban transformations of the new century are taking place in the developing world. In particular, informality, once associated with poor squatter settlements, is now seen as a generalized mode of metropolitan urbanization. This article focuses on urban informality to highlight the challenges of dealing with the "unplannable" —exceptions to the order of formal urbanizatio...

Urban Informality as a Commons Dilemma

The Returns to Formality and Informality in Urban Africa

This paper addresses the question as to why we observe such large differentials in earnings in urban African labour markets after controlling for observable human capital. We first use a three year panel across Ghana and Tanzania and find common patterns for both countries assuming that movement between occupations is exogenous. Unobserved individual market ability is by far the most important ...

Bank of Zambia MONETARY POLICY FRAMEWORK AND IMPLEMENTATION IN ZAMBIA

This paper reviews the monetary policy framework and implementation in Zambia since 1992. The paper argues that the thrust and orientation of monetary policy after 1992 has been towards market-based instruments of monetary control. In the process, it has been possible to reduce inflation from three-digit figures to an average of about 23 per cent over the past three years. However, formidable c...

Taxing Unwanted Populations: Fiscal Policy and Conversions in Early Islam

Hostility towards a population, whether on religious, ethnic, cultural or socioeconomic grounds, confronts rulers with a trade-off between taking advantage of population members’ eagerness to maintain their identity and inducing them to “comply” (conversion, quit, exodus or any other way of pleasing the hostile rulers). This paper first analyzes the rulers’ optimal mix of discriminatory and non...