Identifying the Rich: Registration, Taxation, and Access to the State in Tanzania

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How do states build their informational capacity? This article argues that distributive politics conditions how the state’s capacity develops. I study civil registration, where citizens comply with the state’s informational demands in exchange for documentary proof of identity, which may simultaneously facilitate access to public resources and exposure to taxation. Though the rich are particularly threatened by taxation, the narrow benefits of registration induce their compliance over that of the poor. I leverage a set of reforms in early postindependence Tanzania which provide quasi-random variation in citizens’ registration status and show that registration promotes access to narrow-based resources, rather than broad-based ones, while increasing tax payment. In turn, citizens’ decisions to comply reflect the economically stratified local incidence of these net benefits. The results suggest how nominally universal state-building schemes can have regressive effects on the state’s coverage.