No abstract

The study investigates sectoral composition and tax revenue performance in ECOWAS countries. Specifically, the study examines taxable capacity, tax efforts and tax structure of thirteen Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) countries taking into account three major sectors comprising agriculture, service and industrial sectors for the period 2000 to 2015. This is meant to bridge the gap in the extant literature which mainly focused on tax revenue to gross domestic product without taking into account taxable capacity and tax efforts with respect to specific sectors of the economy. The study employed stochastic frontier, forecast error variance decomposition, vector autoregression and the generalized methods of moment accordingly in the empirical analysis. The result from the analysis shows that the hypothesis of a low taxable capacity and tax efforts in the agricultural, industrial and service sectors in ECOWAS countries should be rejected. Specifically, the result revealed that though the three sectors are yet to be maximally exploited, the taxable capacity of ECOWAS countries is reasonably high. Also, the service and industrial sectors express more favourable responses to the tax revenue performance compared to the agricultural sector. It was recommended among others that on the average the governments of ECOWAS countries should formalize and strengthens tax revenue collections in the agricultural, service and industrial sectors.

The impacts remittances and trade balance has on growth in West Africa sub-region was examine for the period 2007 to 2019. To this end, based on relevant theory a model was drawn. However, prior to estimation, reliability and validity of the data set was examined. This was followed by unit root test which shows that all variables attained stationarity at their first difference while Cointegration test indicated that there exists a long-run convergence among the variables. System Generalised Method of Moment estimation revealed that remittances inflows significantly and positively impact economic growth while trade balance exerted a negative and significant impact on economic growth. The over-identifying restrictions test of J-Statistics revealed that the instrument of measurement employed was valid. It was recommended among others that policy makers in West Africa should implement policies that continually encourage remittances inflow to the sub-region while ensuring that trade deficits emanates from productive investment.