Abstract
My research stay in Ethiopia gives me the opportunity to strengthen my paper on the reproduction of global tax norms in Eastern Africa and publish this article in an academic journal (Review International Political Economy). In 2020, I spend several months in Kenya, Uganda, and Rwanda, to study why these countries adopted of OECD-type transfer pricing regulations and interviewed stakeholder, tax
officials, and members of the Ministry of Finance, to find out what motivated their implementation efforts.
This strategy matched the initial theory building phase of my research, especially as I adopted a process tracing methodology (Beach and Pederson, 2018), but this lack of variation stands in the way of formally testing my hypothesis that builds on historical institutionalist theory of network effects.
The three case studies I studied hinted that widespread adoption of OECD transfer pricing norms created a compatibility advantage and that these network externalities are among the powerful lock-in effects that have cemented the position of the OECD guidelines in global tax governance. My assumption however is that domestic coalitions, as opposed to OECD domination or politics of expertise, drive the mobilization of these network effects that push for adoption of OECD norms. In Ethiopia, these norms did not find their way in administrative practice, and my hypothesis on the role of domestic coalitions should be able to explain this lack of implementation. Therefore, I collect interviews from international tax experts at the ministry of finance and at the revenue authority, in addition to other stakeholders in the transfer pricing debate in Ethiopia, and compare their role and position to domestic coalitions in Kenya, Rwanda, and Uganda.
Researcher(s)
Research team(s)
Project type(s)