Publication:
Haiti: Strengthening Customs Administration in an Insecure Environment

Loading...
Thumbnail Image
Files in English
English PDF (1.08 MB)
394 downloads
English Text (147.15 KB)
19 downloads
Other Files
French PDF (2.18 MB)
68 downloads
French Text (167.95 KB)
36 downloads
Published
2024-05-22
ISSN
Date
2024-05-22
Author(s)
Editor(s)
Abstract
This report is motivated by three primary factors. First, customs administrations tend to continue to operate in crisis situations, contrary to other government services. Moreover, customs taxation is the simplest tax instrument to enforce during security crisis periods because it concerns traded goods, which are easier to tax than individuals or companies. Tax revenues in Haiti are low at 6.3 percent of GDP in FY23 and insufficient to provide adequate public services. As such, customs is the single largest source of domestic revenue and leakage in customs revenues is significant. Second, as noted, strengthened customs practices and applications have the potential to significantly strengthen the legitimacy of the State and build greater trust between the government and the citizenry, including better controlling transborder criminal activity. AGD has a high profile, and corruption, unfair treatment, and perceived ineffectiveness in the administration of customs practices is viewed as highly problematic by the citizenry. Third, the current insecure environment in Haiti, including the increasing gang presence and resultant personal security concerns, presents significant constraints and challenges in carrying out basic customs services and practices, not to mention meaningful reforms. AGD could benefit from lessons learned in other fragile, conflict-affected, and vulnerable settings (FCV) and better adapt to the current insecure environment.
Link to Data Set
Citation
World Bank. 2024. Haiti: Strengthening Customs Administration in an Insecure Environment. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/41581 License: CC BY-NC 3.0 IGO.
Associated URLs
Associated content
Report Series
Other publications in this report series
Journal
Journal Volume
Journal Issue

Related items

Showing items related by metadata.

  • Publication
    Review of the Tax System in the Kyrgyz Republic
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-07-05) World Bank
    Tax revenues to GDP ratio in the Kyrgyz Republic is higher than most lower middle income countries at above 28 percent of GDP in 2022, but complex tax structure, narrow base and remaining weaknesses in tax administration pose risks to sustainability and create unequal tax burden across taxpayers. Revenue performance in 2021-23 improved significantly due to improvements in tax administration, but significant share of the improved tax collection is contributed by VAT on imports which is likely attributed to trade diversion after imposition of trade sanctions on Russia. The transit trade driven by the sanctions has increased substantially during 2022-2023 period. If the relative share of imports would have stayed at the actual 2021 level (64.5 percent), we estimate that the transit trade contributed to increase in VAT revenues of KGS 25.2 billion (equivalent of 2.6 percent of GDP) in 2022, and an estimated KGS 37.9 billion in additional VAT revenues (3.3 percent of estimated GDP) in 2023. These one-off exceptional revenues should be isolated and treated separately when making medium-to-longer run tax revenue forecasts and when considering tax policies. This report looks into three major issues, tax gap and how it could be reasonably reduced over the medium term; needed tax policy changes; and how administration provisions in tax legislation can support the same level of tax revenues, with more equitable distribution of tax burden promoting growth and lowering compliance costs. The report touches briefly on tax administration key issues, as ongoing tax administration reform agenda supported by the World Bank funded project is currently underway.
  • Publication
    Tax Expenditure Manual
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-07-15) World Bank
    This manual is a contribution to the rich body of literature on tax expenditures and aim to inform policymakers and policy debates on tax expenditures reform. In doing so, it builds on the existing knowledge and endeavors to provide a comprehensive guidance on key aspects of tax expenditure analysis. Considering that cross-country comparability of tax expenditure estimates is challenging due to differences in benchmarking, this manual specifically aims to provide guidance on how to benchmark some of the most common features of a tax system. This manual should be seen as a contribution to the vast ocean of knowledge on tax expenditures, rather than an exhaustive guide to all their complexities. This guidance endeavors to assist policy practitioners, especially in developing countries, in navigating and understandingtax expenditure issues.
  • Publication
    Mozambique - Agriculture Support Policy Review
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-07-26) World Bank
    Various efforts have been made to comprehensively assess agricultural policies in countries worldwide using diverse methodologies, including some generated by several international organizations. Since first applied in the 1980s, the OECD’s methodology has been regarded as a practical policy monitoring and evaluation tool. It has been frequently used as a reference to establish a dialogue at the national and international levels since it allows comparisons among countries and their economies, measuring the impact of policies on the gross income of both consumers and producers. The OECD methodology focuses on estimating the value of monetary transfers made by taxpayers and consumers, specifically to agricultural producers, as a direct result of the implementation of agricultural policies. This study aims to apply the OECD methodology to measure monetary transfers to the agricultural sector and the producers between 2019 and 2022.
  • Publication
    Assessment of Trends in General Education Public Expenditure in Zambia
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2022-07-01) World Bank
    Over the past decade, Zambia’s gross domestic product (GDP) has been decreasing as a result of a devastating combination of external and domestic shocks. The country’s macroeconomic environment was weakened by the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite the worsening fiscal outlook, the need for better investments in human capital has never been greater. Building human capital is made more challenging because quality services need to cover a large proportion of the population. The main objective of this policy brief is to assess the funding of pre-primary to tertiary education and how effectively resources are utilized. The 2016 to 2021 period is used for review.
  • Publication
    Firms’ Networks Under Export Exemption Regimes
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-05-21) Bermúdez, Jose Carlo; Flores, Tatiana; Scot, Thiago
    This report uses administrative tax data on firm-to-firm trade in Honduras to evaluate the degree of integration between firms receiving export-oriented tax exemptions and the local economy. We present five stylized facts regarding firms’ trade networks in Honduras and show that, across several dimensions, the networks of firms in export-oriented regimes do not differ from those of other similarly sized firms. Our findings challenge the idea that export-oriented regimes benefit firms with no connections to the local economy.

Users also downloaded

Showing related downloaded files

  • Publication
    Governance Matters IV : Governance Indicators for 1996-2004
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2005-06) Kaufmann, Daniel; Kraay, Aart; Mastruzzi, Massimo
    The authors present the latest update of their aggregate governance indicators, together with new analysis of several issues related to the use of these measures. The governance indicators measure the following six dimensions of governance: (1) voice and accountability; (2) political instability and violence; (3) government effectiveness; (4) regulatory quality; (5) rule of law, and (6) control of corruption. They cover 209 countries and territories for 1996, 1998, 2000, 2002, and 2004. They are based on several hundred individual variables measuring perceptions of governance, drawn from 37 separate data sources constructed by 31 organizations. The authors present estimates of the six dimensions of governance for each period, as well as margins of error capturing the range of likely values for each country. These margins of error are not unique to perceptions-based measures of governance, but are an important feature of all efforts to measure governance, including objective indicators. In fact, the authors give examples of how individual objective measures provide an incomplete picture of even the quite particular dimensions of governance that they are intended to measure. The authors also analyze in detail changes over time in their estimates of governance; provide a framework for assessing the statistical significance of changes in governance; and suggest a simple rule of thumb for identifying statistically significant changes in country governance over time. The ability to identify significant changes in governance over time is much higher for aggregate indicators than for any individual indicator. While the authors find that the quality of governance in a number of countries has changed significantly (in both directions), they also provide evidence suggesting that there are no trends, for better or worse, in global averages of governance. Finally, they interpret the strong observed correlation between income and governance, and argue against recent efforts to apply a discount to governance performance in low-income countries.
  • Publication
    Design Thinking for Social Innovation
    (2010-07) Brown, Tim; Wyatt, Jocelyn
    Designers have traditionally focused on enchancing the look and functionality of products.
  • Publication
    Governance Matters VIII : Aggregate and Individual Governance Indicators 1996–2008
    (2009-06-01) Kaufmann, Daniel; Kraay, Aart; Mastruzzi, Massimo
    This paper reports on the 2009 update of the Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) research project, covering 212 countries and territories and measuring six dimensions of governance between 1996 and 2008: Voice and Accountability, Political Stability and Absence of Violence/Terrorism, Government Effectiveness, Regulatory Quality, Rule of Law, and Control of Corruption. These aggregate indicators are based on hundreds of specific and disaggregated individual variables measuring various dimensions of governance, taken from 35 data sources provided by 33 different organizations. The data reflect the views on governance of public sector, private sector and NGO experts, as well as thousands of citizen and firm survey respondents worldwide. The authors also explicitly report the margins of error accompanying each country estimate. These reflect the inherent difficulties in measuring governance using any kind of data. They find that even after taking margins of error into account, the WGI permit meaningful cross-country comparisons as well as monitoring progress over time. The aggregate indicators, together with the disaggregated underlying indicators, are available at www.govindicators.org.
  • Publication
    Government Matters III : Governance Indicators for 1996-2002
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2003-08) Kaufmann, Daniel; Kraay, Aart; Mastruzzi, Massimo
    The authors present estimates of six dimensions of governance covering 199 countries and territories for four time periods: 1996, 1998, 2000, and 2002. These indicators are based on several hundred individual variables measuring perceptions of governance, drawn from 25 separate data sources constructed by 18 different organizations. The authors assign these individual measures of governance to categories capturing key dimensions of governance and use an unobserved components model to construct six aggregate governance indicators in each of the four periods. They present the point estimates of the dimensions of governance as well as the margins of errors for each country for the four periods. The governance indicators reported here are an update and expansion of previous research work on indicators initiated in 1998 (Kaufmann, Kraay, and Zoido-Lobat 1999a,b and 2002). The authors also address various methodological issues, including the interpretation and use of the data given the estimated margins of errors.
  • Publication
    Breaking the Conflict Trap : Civil War and Development Policy
    (Washington, DC: World Bank and Oxford University Press, 2003) Collier, Paul; Elliott, V. L.; Hegre, Håvard; Hoeffler, Anke; Reynal-Querol, Marta; Sambanis, Nicholas
    Most wars are now civil wars. Even though international wars attract enormous global attention, they have become infrequent and brief. Civil wars usually attract less attention, but they have become increasingly common and typically go on for years. This report argues that civil war is now an important issue for development. War retards development, but conversely, development retards war. This double causation gives rise to virtuous and vicious circles. Where development succeeds, countries become progressively safer from violent conflict, making subsequent development easier. Where development fails, countries are at high risk of becoming caught in a conflict trap in which war wrecks the economy and increases the risk of further war. The global incidence of civil war is high because the international community has done little to avert it. Inertia is rooted in two beliefs: that we can safely 'let them fight it out among themselves' and that 'nothing can be done' because civil war is driven by ancestral ethnic and religious hatreds. The purpose of this report is to challenge these beliefs.