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Funding Development: Ethiopia Tries to Strengthen its Tax System

In its 2006 national vision to end poverty, Ethiopia set its sights on becoming a middle-income country by 2025. The goal was ambitious for a country that, at the time, was one of the poorest in the world. To support development objectives put on hold during a decade of political turbulence, the Ethiopian government sought to expand its resources by boosting tax revenues. It merged its separate customs and domestic tax offices and restructured the new agency's operations along functional lines. Then it increased salaries, adopted stringent anticorruption rules, implemented a modern information technology system, and launched public awareness campaigns. Although progress stalled in 2013, a new round of IT and legal reforms in 2016 helped increase tax collection significantly and in 2018, under a new prime minister, the government began to take further steps to strengthen tax collection. This case study profiles the story.

A market trader at Merkato Market, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Photo by Antony Robbins, March 2008.

Applying to Graduate School in the U.S.? 

Some of our readers asked us to provide some guidance and occasional schedule reminders for applying to graduate school in the United States. Here is how to prepare. 

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Innovations for Successful Societies (ISS) is a program of Princeton University's
Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs