Tax revenue and mobile money in developing countries

Abstract

This paper analyzes the effect of mobile money adoption on tax revenue performance in a large sample of 104 developing countries over the period 1990–2019. Estimations, based on the entropy balancing method, show that mobile money significantly increases tax revenue in mobile money countries relative to non-mobile money countries. This result remains robust to various robustness tests and may depend on time perspective, the type of mobile money service, and some structural factors, including a country's level of development, corruption level, rural population size, inflation rate, education level, tax revenue sample 25th percentile and average, revenue administration efficiency, and mature markets. A first level of disaggregation of tax revenue into direct and indirect tax revenue shows that mobile money increases both types of tax revenue, with a larger impact on direct tax revenue. A second level of disaggregation of these two components into different sub-categories shows that the effect on direct tax revenue is driven by personal income tax revenue and corporate income tax revenue and that on indirect tax revenue is determined by taxes on goods and services. Finally, a broadening tax base (proxied by GDP per capita), better institutional quality, and tax payment process simplification are the main channels through which mobile money adoption increases tax performance in developing countries.