Economy

Improving Tanzania’s business environment is central to the government’s drive to encourage investment. Ranking in the top 100 of the World Bank’s “Doing Business” report was a target of the first five-year development plan that ran to 2016. However, by the time the second plan covering 2016-21 was formulated in 2016, Tanzania had fallen nine...

Recent decades have seen a downward convergence in corporate tax regimes as advanced, emerging and developing economies moved to grab a bigger slice of the global investment pie. Headline corporate tax rates have fallen by 20 percentage points since the early 1980s. Alongside lower average rates, special tax incentives aimed at capturing...

One of the focal points of the Tanzanian government’s long-term development strategy is industrialisation. In the five-year development plans (FYDPs) that serve as the foundation for the Tanzania Development Vision 2025, manufacturing is a key component. The second FYDP – covering 2016 to 2021 – set a sectoral growth target of over 10%...

Widening the tax net is an important part of the government’s attempt to reduce its fiscal deficit and balance the books. Its principal tool in this effort is value-added tax (VAT), which accounted for 63% of consumption taxes in 2013/14, according to the Ministry of Finance and Planning. Adjusting the VAT schedule typically has an immediate...

The informal sector makes up a large share of activity in most of Africa’s largest economies. The OECD estimates that informal work accounts for two-thirds of non-agricultural employment in sub-Saharan Africa. In the case of Tanzania the figure is even higher, with 76% of the non-agricultural workforce subsisting outside the formal economic...