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Custers, Anna

Macroeconomics, Trade, and Investment Global Practice
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Tax Policy, Tax Administration, Fiscal Policy
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0000-0002-1725-5267
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Macroeconomics, Trade, and Investment Global Practice
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Last updated: September 19, 2024
Biography
Anna Custers is an Economist in the Macroeconomics, Trade & Investment Global Practice at the World Bank, where she focuses on fiscal policy in developing countries. She currently works on macro-fiscal issues in Afghanistan, including PFM reforms. She has provided technical assistance to revenue and customs administrations in Georgia, Nigeria Pakistan, Tajikistan, Uganda and Uzbekistan. Prior to joining the World Bank, Anna worked with the Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) in both India and France. She holds a PhD in Management Research from the University of Oxford and an MSc in Development Studies from the London School of Economics.

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2020 - 202522000 - 20191
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Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    Trade-offs in the Design of Simplified Tax Regimes: Evidence from Sub-Saharan Africa
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-09-19) Hoy, Christopher; Scot, Thiago; Oguso, Alex; Custers, Anna; Zalo, Daniel; Doino, Ruggero; Karver, Jonathan; Orgeira Pillai, Nicolas
    This paper provides novel evidence of the trade-offs policy makers face when designing simplified tax regimes for small businesses. First, it provides a comprehensive stocktaking of the main features of these regimes across Sub-Saharan Africa: they are adopted by two-thirds of countries, but their design varies greatly. Second, it draws on administrative and survey data for a thorough examination of a specific simplified tax regime. This analysis shows most small businesses lack knowledge about design features, such as the existence of a minimum exemption threshold, but they react strongly to increases in tax rates by lowering their declared turnover. Finally, the paper presents the results of an experiment that encourages taxpayers to pay fixed amounts—a potential alternative design of a simplified tax regime that aims for a better balance of the trade-offs facing policy makers. The findings show that providing simple guidance about how much small businesses with similar characteristics typically pay in taxes can increase revenue, but this reduces equity among taxpayers.
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    Innovations in Tax Compliance: Building Trust, Navigating Politics, and Tailoring Reform
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2022-02-17) Dom, Roel; Custers, Anna; Davenport, Stephen R.; Prichard, Wilson
    Recent decades have seen important progress in strengthening country tax systems. Yet many areas of reform have remained stubbornly resistant to major improvements. Overall, revenue collection still falls short of that needed for effective governance and service delivery. Tax collection is too often riddled with high rates of evasion among large corporations and the rich and by disproportionate, though often hidden, burdens on lower-income groups. As countries around the world deal with the large debt burdens induced by COVID-19, an in-depth look at how to strengthen tax systems is especially timely. Innovations in Tax Compliance: Building Trust, Navigating Politics, and Tailoring Reform takes a fresh look at tax reform. The authors draw on recent research and experience for their new conceptual framework to guide more effective approaches to reform. Building on the achievements of recent decades, they argue for a greater emphasis on the overlapping goals of building trust, navigating political resistance, and tailoring reform to unique local contexts—an emphasis achieved by identifying the most binding constraints on reform. This focus not only can lead to greater compliance, a fairer system, and higher revenues, but also can contribute to building state capacity, sustained political support for further reforms, and a stronger fiscal contract between citizens and governments.
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    Innovations in Tax Compliance: Conceptual Framework
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-10) Roscitt, Michael; Prichard, Wilson; Custers, Anna; Dom, Roel; Davenport, Stephen R.
    This paper presents a conceptual framework for developing more effective approaches to tax reform and compliance. The framework proposes that by combining complementary investments in enforcement, facilitation, and trust, reformers can not only strengthen enforced compliance but can also (a) encourage quasi-voluntary compliance, (b) generate sustainable political support for reform, and (c) create conditions that are more conducive to the construction of stronger fiscal contracts. A key challenge for governments lies in finding the right combination of these three measures -- enforcement, facilitation, and trust—to achieve revenue and broader development goals. The framework proposes greater reliance on locally grounded binding constraints analysis, coupled with careful attention to understanding politics and the drivers of trust in particular contexts, to guide analysis of how best different investments may be combined, prioritized, or sequenced. This framework can help policy makers to think about the right combination of strategies in specific contexts, and thus to allocate resources most effectively.