Political Economy of Tax Reform: Institutional Determinants of Revenue Administration Capacity in Sub-Saharan Africa with Focus on Nigeria

This doctoral study examines the political economy determinants of tax reform success and revenue administration capacity in Sub-Saharan Africa, with Nigeria as the central case and a comparative panel of twelve African countries. The political economy literature on taxation highlights how elite interests, electoral politics, ethnic coalitions, and donor conditionality shape the trajectory of fiscal institutions, often producing reform sequences that diverge from technocratic optimality. Nigeria's chequered history of revenue administration reform, spanning the creation of the FIRS as an autonomous body to successive reorganisations of the Joint Tax Board, provides exceptionally rich material for institutional analysis. Using a comparative historical institutionalist methodology complemented by a cross-country panel regression covering 1990 to 2023, the study tests hypotheses on how executive concentration of power, oil revenue abundance, legislative capacity, bureaucratic autonomy, and civil society pressure jointly determine revenue administration quality, measured through the International Survey on Revenue Administration index. In-depth process tracing of five Nigerian reform episodes provides causal mechanism evidence. The study expects to find that oil abundance systematically undermines the political incentives for tax administration investment and that the establishment of autonomous revenue authorities is insufficient for capacity building without complementary civil service professionalisation reforms. Theoretical contributions include a revised political economy model of tax reform pathways applicable to rentier-state fiscal transitions. Keywords: political economy, tax reform, revenue administration, institutional capacity, Sub-Saharan Africa.