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91. Two decades of Tanzanian health policy Examining policy developments and opportunities through a gender lens

Author:
Roosa Lambin and Milla Nyyssölä
Publication Date:
03-2022
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
United Nations University
Abstract:
Tanzania has undertaken important health sector reforms in the new millennium, and the most recent Health Sector Strategic Plan (2021–26) lays out ambitious targets to achieve universal health coverage. Yet, women in Tanzania continue to face significant barriers in accessing healthcare and the country is grappling with important gender-biased health challenges disadvantaging women. The aims of this paper are two-fold. First, we examine the evolution of Tanzania’s health policy over the past two decades (2000–21) from the perspective of enhancing financial protection for working-age women. Second, we explore policy options for genderresponsive health insurance expansion in the context of Tanzania. Methodologically, the paper draws on a scoping study of diverse literature and data and a review of evidence from other contexts with public health insurance schemes. We find that Tanzania has a fragmented health system that relies on several independent schemes introduced throughout the years, characterized by insufficient risk-pooling. Such a system provides insufficient financial protection for workingage women and female-headed households, which are financially less secure than dual-earner households. Although expanding health insurance coverage represents a viable corrective measure, future reforms must account for women’s lower financial contribution capacity to enable equitable access. Additionally, the policy design requires gender-mainstreamed investments in awarenessraising, service quality, and benefit packages.
Topic:
Health Care Policy, Reform, Women, Finance, and Health Insurance
Political Geography:
Africa and Tanzania

92. The Tanzanian state response to COVID-19: Why low capacity, discursive legitimacy, and twilight authority matter

Author:
Amy S. Patterson
Publication Date:
03-2022
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
United Nations University
Abstract:
Tanzania received significant global attention for its COVID-19 response during the first year of the pandemic. It did not share pandemic statistics, require masks, implement lockdowns, or close borders; it questioned testing and vaccine efficacy; and it emphasized traditional medicines as a cure. The country’s response reflected a centralized, paternalistic state that emerged under postcolonial president Julius Nyerere and that stressed self-reliance and national unity. Although local officials did have some discretion to respond, the state’s top-down solutions, its low capacity, and the broader campaign against bureaucratic corruption curtailed the space in which they could act. Nyerere’s legitimating discourse of nationalism, self-reliance, and paternalism further problematized the global cooperation needed to address the pandemic and limited the space in which civil society could challenge state actions. The state’s struggle for authority in the face of nonstate actors such as opposition parties and civil society groups led it to embrace strategies such as electoral authoritarianism to maintain control, thereby obscuring transparency and accountability in the pandemic. The focus on state capacity, legitimacy, and authority situate individual leaders’ actions in broader structural contexts, while also showing African state agency.
Topic:
Nationalism, Authoritarianism, Elections, Legitimacy, Capacity, and Authority
Political Geography:
Africa and Tanzania

93. Profit shifting by multinational corporations: Evidence from transaction-level data in Nigeria

Author:
Bathusi Gabanatlhong, Javier Garcia-Bernardo, Paulinus Iyika, and Miroslav Palanský
Publication Date:
03-2022
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
United Nations University
Abstract:
Research on profit shifting by multinational corporations in developing countries is limited due to a lack of data. In this paper we use, for the first time, novel administrative data on the transactions of multinational corporations operating in Nigeria vis-à-vis related parties in other jurisdictions. The data provides a breakdown of these intra-group transactions into seven categories: (1) tangible goods, (2) services and fees, (3) royalties, (4) interest, (5) dividends, (6) reimbursements, and (7) other. We develop a methodology that uses this data to identify which transactions are most often used by multinationals to shift profits out of Nigeria and estimate their relative importance. We find that profits reported in Nigeria are highly sensitive to the hypothetical tax that would be paid on a transaction’s value in the partner jurisdiction: a 1 per cent increase in the hypothetical tax on outgoing transactions is associated with a 0.28 per cent increase in reported profits in Nigeria. Payments for services and fees, royalties, and interest going from Nigerian companies to affiliates in low-tax countries are the most important channels of profit shifting in Nigeria. We argue that our approach can be used to inform low-cost policy interventions and increase audit efficiency with potentially strong effects on corporate income tax collection.
Topic:
Multinational Corporations, Profit, Transactions, and Tax Havens
Political Geography:
Africa and Nigeria

94. Exploring social policy trajectories in Mainland Tanzania: Driving for gender-inclusive development?

Author:
Roosa Lambin and Milla Nyyssölä
Publication Date:
03-2022
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
United Nations University
Abstract:
In July 2020, the United Republic of Tanzania gained the status of a lower-middleincome country. This came after two decades of significant social policy reforms and transformations in the country’s economic structures. This paper explores social policy trajectories in Mainland Tanzania with a gender lens, to better understand the contributions of these developments to inclusive development. More precisely, we examine past and current policy developments across the areas of health policy, social protection, and employment policy, and the level, reach, and quality of government social policy delivery to working-age women. The paper draws on a scoping review of diverse secondary materials, including academic publications, government policy documents, relevant statistics, and other types of literature. The findings indicate that despite significant advancements in the legal frameworks and increasingly gender-responsive government policy plans, Tanzanian social policy delivery remains two-tiered, with differences in provisions for women in the formal and informal sectors. Additionally, women continue to be largely overlooked in the broader industrialization and development strategy, which hinders the achievement of inclusive development in Tanzania.
Topic:
Development, Social Policy, Inclusion, and Gender
Political Geography:
Africa and Tanzania

95. Profit shifting by multinational corporations in Kenya: The role of internal debt

Author:
Roseline Misati, Kethi Ngoka, Anne Kamau, and Maureen Odongo
Publication Date:
03-2022
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
United Nations University
Abstract:
Illicit financial flows directly impact a country’s ability to raise, retain, and mobilize its own resources to finance sustainable development. Against a backdrop of a weak public financial position attributed to capital flight, tax avoidance, and dependence on corporate income taxes, governments in Africa face impediments to their efforts to widen the tax base. Using firm-level annual data from 2015–19 from multinational corporations’ audited financial statements, we assess the scale of profit shifting by those corporations with a presence in Kenya. Using a panel analysis, the study delves into the incentives for profit shifting, focusing on internal debt. It finds that a 10 per cent increase in the difference between Kenya’s corporate tax rate and that of the lending corporation’s home country increases the internal debt ratio by between 1 and 2 per cent. The results provide a basis for the design of targeted tax and revenue administration reforms against the backdrop of rising revenue needs.
Topic:
Multinational Corporations, Tax Systems, Profit, and Corporate Tax
Political Geography:
Kenya and Africa

96. The Economic Complexity of Namibia: A Roadmap for Productive Diversification

Author:
Ricardo Hausmann, Miguel Angel Santos, Douglas Barrios, Nikita Taniparti, Jorge Tudela Pye, and Jessie Lu
Publication Date:
03-2022
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
The John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University
Abstract:
After a large growth acceleration within the context of the commodity super cycle (2000- 2015), Namibia has been grappling with three interrelated challenges: economic growth, fiscal sustainability, and inclusion. Accelerating technological progress and enhancing Namibia’s knowhow agglomeration is crucial to the process of fostering new engines of growth that will deliver progress across the three targets. Using net exports data at the four-digit level, we estimate the economic complexity of Namibia – a measure of knowhow agglomeration – vis-à-vis its peers. Our results suggest that Namibia’s economy is relatively less complex and attractive opportunities to diversify tend to be more distant. Based on economic complexity metrics, we define a place-specific path for productive diversification, identifying industries with high potential and providing inputs – related to their feasibility and attractiveness in Namibia – for further prioritization. Namibia’s path to structural transformation will likely be steeper than for most peers, calling for a more active policy stance geared towards progressive accumulation of productive capacities, well-targeted “long jumps”, and strengthening state capacity to sort out market failures associated with the process of self-discovery.
Topic:
Development, Economy, Economic Complexity, and Industry
Political Geography:
Africa and Namibia

97. Getting Real about Unknowns in Complex Policy Work

Author:
Matt Andrews
Publication Date:
02-2022
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
The John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University
Abstract:
As with all public policy work, education policies are demanding. Policy workers need to ‘know’ a lot—about the problems they are addressing, the people who need to be engaged, the promises they can make in response, the context they are working in, and the processes they will follow to implement. Most policy workers answer questions about such issues within the structures of plan and control processes used to devise budgets and projects. These structures limit their knowledge gathering, organization and sense-making activities to up-front planning activities, and even though sophisticated tools like Theories of Change suggest planners ‘know’ all that is needed for policy success, they often do not. Policies are often fraught with ‘unknowns’ that cannot be captured in passive planning processes and thus repeatedly undermine even the best laid plans. Through a novel strategy that asks how much one knows about the answers to 25 essential policy questions, and an application to recent education policy interventions in Mozambique, this paper shows that it is possible to get real about unknowns in policy work. Just recognizing these unknowns exist—and understanding why they do and what kind of challenge they pose to policy workers—can help promote a more modest and realistic approach to doing complex policy work.
Topic:
Education, Government, and Public Policy
Political Geography:
Africa and Mozambique

98. A Growth Diagnostic of Namibia

Author:
Ricardo Hausmann, Miguel Angel Santos, Douglas Barrios, Nikita Taniparti, Jorge Tudela Pye, Jose Francisco Muci, and Jessie Lu
Publication Date:
02-2022
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
The John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University
Abstract:
In the thirty years that have passed since independence, Namibia has been characterized by its over-reliance on its mineral resource wealth, procyclicality of macroeconomic policy, and large income disparities. After an initial decade marked by nation building and slow growth (1990-2000), the Namibian economy embarked on a rapid growth acceleration that lasted 15 years, within the context of the global commodity super cycle. Favorable terms of trade translated into an investment and export boom in the mining sector, which was amplified to the non-tradable sector of the economy through a significant public expenditure spree from 2008 onwards. Between 2000 and 2015 income and consumption per capita expanded at an average annual rate of 3.1%, poverty rates halved, and access to essential public goods expanded rapidly. As the commodity super cycle came to an end and the fiscal space was exhausted, Namibia experienced a significant reversal. Investment and exports plummeted, bringing GDP per capita to contract by 2.1% between 2015-2019. With debt-to-GDP ratios 3.5 times higher than those in 2008, the country embarked on a fiscal consolidation effort which brought the primary fiscal deficit from 6.8% of GDP in 2016 to 0.6% by March 2020. Along all these years, inequality has been endemic and is reflected across demographic characteristics and employment status. At present, a large majority of Namibians are unable to access well-paying formal sector jobs, as these tend to be particularly scarce outside of the public sector. Looking forward, the road to sustained inclusive growth and broad prosperity entails expanding the formal private labor market by diversifying the Namibian economy, while at the same time removing the barriers preventing Namibians from accessing these opportunities inherited from the apartheid.
Topic:
Development, Economy, Economic Growth, Inclusion, and Skills
Political Geography:
Africa and Namibia

99. Can Africa Compete in World Soccer?

Author:
Matt Andrews
Publication Date:
01-2022
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
The John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University
Abstract:
In March 2021, the Confederation of African Football’s President, Patrice Motsepe, insisted that “An African team must win the World Cup in the near future.” This visionary statement is infused with hope—not just for an African World Cup victory but for a fuller future in which African men’s soccer competes with world soccer’s elite. This paper asks if there is any chance of this happening. It suggests a simple method to assess how a country competes as both a ‘participant’ and a ‘rival’ and uses this method to examine how Africa’s top countries compete in world soccer. This analysis points to a gap between such countries and the world’s best, which has grown in recent decades— even though some African countries do compete more over time. The paper concludes by suggesting that Africa’s hope of winning the World Cup is not impossible but demands more active work, focused particularly on ensuring top African countries compete with more high-quality competition more often. The conclusion also suggests that the research approach might be relevant beyond a study of African soccer. It could particularly help shed light on how well African countries compete (as participants and rivals) in the world economy.
Topic:
Sports, Economy, Soccer, and Competition
Political Geography:
Africa

100. America, You Better Believe That Africa Matters

Author:
Charles Ray
Publication Date:
05-2022
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
American Diplomacy
Abstract:
In the minds of most Americans and Europeans, the continent of Africa has long been seen as peripheral to world affairs, looked at either as a source of natural resources ripe for extraction or a place of poverty and violence requiring massive amounts of aid. This is a shortsighted and distorted view of a diverse continent and is long overdue for a reset. The truth is that Africa is home to some of the planet’s most strategic minerals and other resources, and that natural and manmade disasters plague the continent. It is far more diverse and dynamic than popular culture, mainstream media, and even many foreign policy makers portray it. For a lot of reasons, some of them existential, it is far from peripheral; it matters.
Topic:
Foreign Policy, Diplomacy, and Natural Resources
Political Geography:
Africa and United States of America