Seminar in International Political Economy and International Development

Nita Rudra (Georgetown University), “Poor Democracies in a Conundrum: International Trade and Government Revenues in Developing Countries”

Graham Wallas Room (5th floor of the Old Building) 10th of October 2014 3:00-4:30 pm

Governments of developing countries need revenue to meet their substantial spending, development, and poverty reduction goals. How has globalization affected their ability to raise such revenues?  In this analysis, we contribute to the globalization and taxation debate by focusing on the fiscal impacts of declining international trade tax revenue in poor nations. We hypothesize that regime type is a major determinant of revenue raising capacity after liberalization policies have been adopted. As international trade taxes decline- once the primary form of government revenue generation in developing economies- policymakers in poor democracies find it more challenging than their authoritarian counterparts to replace the revenue loss via domestic tax reform. The unfortunate consequence is that the failure to recover declining trade tax revenue in democracies is then associated with a reduction in spending on public goods.

Biography

Nita Rudra is an Associate Professor of Government at Georgetown University.  Her research interests include:  the distributional impacts of globalization as they are mediated by politics and institutions; the influence of international organizations on social welfare in developing economies; the political foundations of different welfare regimes; and  the causes and effects of democracy in globalizing developing nations. Her most critical works appear in the British Journal of Political Science, World Politics, Journal of Politics, American Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, International Organization, and International Studies Quarterly.  She has a book with Cambridge University Press entitled: Globalization and the Race to the Bottom in Developing Countries: Who Really Gets Hurt?   She completed a one-year fellowship awarded by the Fulbright-Nehru Foundation at the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore India in 2011.  She has also been a recipient of the International Affairs Fellowship from the Council on Foreign Relations, which placed her at the Social Development Department of the World Bank for one year.