Person:
Davenport, Stephen

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Fields of Specialization
Government Technology, Open Government, Transparency, Citizen Engagement, Public Participation, Tax Administration, Fiscal Policy
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ORCID
0000-0003-1077-9057
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U. of Texas
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Contact Information
Last updated: January 31, 2023
Biography
Stephen Davenport is currently the Global Lead for Anticorruption, Openness, and Transparency at the World Bank Group. He works on various projects related to Open Government and GovTech, and co-leads the Innovation in Tax Compliance program, which promotes strategies to engender greater trust in tax administrations. He has more than 20 years of experience in program innovation, development, fundraising, communications, client relationship management, and delivery of e-Government services. Stephen has worked in partnership with the USAID, the World Bank, the International Aid Transparency Initiative, Open Aid Partnership, Open Contracting Partnership, and the Open Government Partnership to accomplish his goals for greater transparency in international development. Stephen has also led breakthrough innovations including the creation of the OpenGov Hub in Washington, DC, the co-creation of FeedBack Labs, and AidData.

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2020 - 202422000 - 20192
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Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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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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    Coming Together While Staying Apart: Facilitating Collective Action through Trust and Social Connection in the Age of COVID-19
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-07) Kallaur, Emily; Davenport, Stephen R.; Kunicova, Jana
    Facing the COVID-19 pandemic requires an unprecedented degree of cooperation between governments and citizens and across all facets of society to implement spatial distancing and other policy measures. This paper proposes to think about handling the pandemic as a collective action problem that can be alleviated by policies that foster trust and social connection. Policy and institutional recommendations are presented according to a three-layered pandemic response generally corresponding to short-, medium-, and long-term needs. This paper focuses on building connection and cooperation as means to bring about better health and socioeconomic outcomes. Many factors outside the paper’s scope, such as health policy choices, will greatly affect the outcomes. As such, the paper explores the role of trust, communication, and collaboration conditional on sound health and economic policy choices.
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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.
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    Improving Efficiency in Public Procurement in Georgia
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-06) Turkewitz, Joel; Nozadze, Sandro; Davenport, Stephen R.; Sjoberg, Fredrik; Mellon, Jonathan; Brough, Mark; La Cascia, Hunt; Agar, Mediha; La Cascia, Joseph Huntington
    The document provides a brief overview of the size and composition of public procurement. It then examines performance in relation to two key outcome variables – the success rate of competitive tenders, and the level of competition in open procedures. The nature of the performance issues in these two areas are explored, and specific recommendations are developed for improving performance in the short to medium term. A different perspective on performance is then provided through examining the degree to which small and medium firms participate in procurement tenders and are awarded contracts. A final section provides a limited number of recommendations on steps to establish a continuous process of data analysis and performance evaluation.