Participatory budgeting and South-South Cooperation in Mozambique
Fiscal and Social Responsibility in São Paulo
International Public Sector Accounting Standards and the UN System of National Accounts
Contrasting infrastructure and fiscal policy trends in Maputo, Mozambique
The Missing Financial Architecture of Urban Development: Exploring the Critical Geography of Urban Property Tax Potential in African Cities
Quality of Growth in Africa
Gabriella was invited to join two new initiatives on the quality of economic growth and urbanization in Sub-Saharan Africa.
In 2016, she joined the IPD/JICA Task Force on Africa led by the Nobel Laureate Professor Joseph Stiglitz at Columbia University. The Initiative for Policy Dialogue Task Forces bring together leading scholars in the areas of economic development and policy. The task force is producing an edited volume on the quality of growth in Africa to be published in 2018.
Gabriella is also an invited member of the UN Economic Commission for Africa’s (UNECA) inception meeting of experts on urbanization and industrialization. Meetings of the UNECA were held in June 2016 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia to discuss the proposed content and process of the recently launched 2017 Economic Report on Africa.
Image credit: Gabriella Carolini.
Participatory budgeting and South-South Cooperation in Mozambique
While the novelty or distinctness of South-South Cooperation (SSC) as a development paradigm is contestable, its relevance for urban planning is not. SSC among cities in the 21st century is growing, and with it reference to Brazil’s experiences in urban reform. This is in evidence in the Mozambican capital of Maputo, where a large portfolio of SSC stakeholders – or thick cooperation – paved the way for the institutionalization of Brazilian-inspired participatory budgeting. Read more here.
Image credit: Gabriella Carolini.
Fiscal and Social Responsibility in São Paulo
The turn of the last century saw two important pieces of legislation introduced in Brazil: the Law of Fiscal Responsibility or LFR (2000) and the Statute of the City (2001). Each legislative act has been separately celebrated for introducing progressive reforms, however in this article I argue that a combination of the LFR’s strict fiscal rules and accounting practices is engendering vulnerabilities for social mandates in cities requiring large capital investments, like slum upgrading. In the city of São Paulo, municipal agencies dedicated to upgrading settlements have seen declines in the relative importance of their budgets since the introduction of the LFR. By presenting budget trends in São Paulo and discussing how the LFR regime has influenced for and by whom upgrading decisions are made, this research reveals that a perversion of intents behind both the LFR and the Statute of the City is evident in practice in São Paulo. More here.
Image credit: Isadora Cruxên.
International Public Sector Accounting Standards and the UN System of National Accounts
As the adoption and harmonization of international public sector accounting standards and guidelines strengthen, decision-making processes and definitions assumed in establishing accounting best practices become more critical objects of study. Especially for countries in the global South that are making efforts to converge with such international guidelines, a critical review is warranted of the creation of the UN's System of National Accounts and the International Federation of Accountants' public sector accounting standards. This research provides evidence of how, as currently designed and articulated, public sector accounting guidelines fail to adequately encompass and address the voices and concerns of governments in the global South. More here.
Contrasting Infrastructure and Fiscal Policy Trends in Maputo, Mozambique
In sub-Saharan African (SSA) cities like Maputo, land commodification is predictably fueled by plans for aspirational infrastructure serving elites. What is rather more peculiar, however, is the way in which the promotion of some fiscal policy reforms can also inadvertently support land commodification and the uneven development it (re)produces. This project examines how efforts to host both democratic fiscal reforms (via localized exercises like participatory budgeting) and to tap into international capital circuits to stir economic development (via aspirational infrastructure and urban redevelopment plans) can produce a Sisyphean dilemma. While gains in ordinary infrastructure investments (e.g. wells, water pumps) are achieved democratically in Maputo's KaTembe district with the participatory budget, these material (and political) improvements are being rendered irrelevant by better funded aspirational infrastructure projects for KaTembe (e.g. bridges, high-rise residential buildings, tourist facilities) supported by more opaque decisions made by the national government without residential input. Given the wide embrace of participatory budgeting in contexts of weak democracy across SSA cities and elsewhere, Maputo's experience serves as a timely alert of the risks run when this popular exercise is prematurely promoted, especially when wider-scaled property tax reforms could better redress uneven and undemocratic urban development. Read more here.
Image credit: Chris Rhie.
The Missing Financial Architecture of Urban Development: Exploring the Critical Geography of Urban Property Tax Potential in African Cities
This research project seeks to contribute to the knowledge frontier on understanding both the explicit and implicit role that property tax revenue systems play in shaping the financial architecture of key urban infrastructures in booming African cities. The central premise of this work is that the financial and related managerial architecture behind urban infrastructure projects, such as those in the water and sanitation sectors, matters for equitable urban development and healthy urban communities. Relatedly, the distributive potential of infrastructure development tied to Africa’s urban real estate boom depends on the strength of governments to socialize project benefits.
Worldwide, the municipal property tax is widely recognized as a critical mechanism that holds the potential to effectively address this distributive challenge. Here we marry an explicit study of property tax potential and viable models of valuation and collection in African cities with an investigation of the implicit role that property tax systems play in determining how key infrastructure projects in cities are financed, and ultimately how this financing shapes who benefits from such projects. The central research question is: how can the revenue potential of the current urban real estate boom in African cities like Addis Ababa be better leveraged to finance key urban infrastructure that services the wide urban population – including the urban poor?
