TaxDev team delivers training in Addis Ababa

Tom Harris and David Phillips from the TaxDev team delivered two successful sets of training to partners from the Tax Policy Directorate (TPD) in the Ethiopian Ministry of Finance, in November 2019 and February 2020. This took place at the Ministry of Finance’s offices in Addis Ababa.

This training formed part of the capacity development arm of our partnership with the TPD, and was aligned with an ongoing a project that is aims to provide a critical assessment of the value-added tax (VAT) and turnover tax (TOT) systems in Ethiopia.

The first week-long training workshop focused on further developing the TPD's understanding of the economic principles underlying tax design, and providing a refresher course on distributional analysis and microsimulation modelling – utilising the country-specific tax and benefit microsimulation model developed by the TaxDev team (ETHTAX).

The objective of the second training workshop was to provide the TPD with a solid grounding in a set of rigorous policy appraisal and policy costing methods; and to embed these methods in the teams approach to policy analysis. This training leveraged policy costing and appraisal templates that were developed by the TaxDev team and are being used across programme.