Improving Taxation to Achieve the Millennium Development Goals in Africa: The Right to Health

Abstract

The role of taxation is inadequately addressed within the context of African development and achievement of human, social and economic rights. There are two broad reasons for uncertainty regarding these relations, one relates to the very definitions of development and how it links to the broader right to development agenda, while the other uncertainty is linked to knowing the statistical relationship in greater detail with specific reference to the right to health in African context where standardised data was obtained regarding both tax and health indicators. This article revisits briefly the first question in the introduction, and then focuses more extensively on the second issue. The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) were a critical step towards the progressive achievement of the most crucial human, social and economic rights. Many countries have made progress towards their achievement, but generally low-income countries in Africa are lagging behind – a question that is increasingly worrying given the new Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) framework being even more ambitious in terms of its goals and targets. This paper will discuss how taxation could be added as a factor in both progress towards the MDGs in African countries in light of new data concerning tax collection from the African Development Bank and the OECD. This study relies on the best quality official data on tax collection in Africa. The data access issue is being addressed by the ICTD at the University of Sussex Institute of Development Studies (IDS) Government Revenue Dataset, which picks up multiple sources and harmonises them to the greatest possible extent [1]. The MDGs will be discussed in light of this data in the context of human, social and cultural rights with specific reference to the right to health and its reflection in the MDG indicators. In discussing the relationship between taxation and MDG several composite development indicators are available. They can be categorized in two broad categories, static and dynamic. Here we are interested in both cases, as a static relationship points towards a historical correlation between the two factors, while the dynamic case demonstrates the potential for improvement. Here we try to focus on both pictures, both in the composite form and on the level of individual development indicators. Proving this relationship will be a major achievement for the better understanding of the relationship between rights and resources needed for their achievement. Once this is proven at a level of certainty, we suggest that the debate in the future can move more towards the practical applications of concerning the types of resources and time lags.