Adjunct Professor of International Economics, SAIS Europe; Research Director, International Centre for Taxation and Development (ICTD); Research Fellow, Institute for Development Studies, Brighton. Giulia Mascagni is Research Director of the International Centre for Taxation and Development (ICTD) and Research Fellow at the Institute for Development Studies (IDS). Professor Mascagni is a development economist, holding a PhD in Economics from the University of Sussex and specializing in public finance in low-income countries. For over ten years, she has been engaged in research and policy advisory work, primarily in Ethiopia and Rwanda. Her main area of research is tax policy and administration in low-income countries, but she also has broader research interests in public finance, evaluation of public policy and aid effectiveness.
Previously she worked as Associate Economic Affairs Officer at the UN Economic Commission for Africa, as an independent consultant for ITAD, the World Bank, the Overseas Development Institute, and as Adviser and Trainee at the European Commission. She has field experience in Ethiopia, Rwanda, and Mozambique, amongst others. In Ethiopia she was Resident Researcher at the Ethiopian Development Research Institute in Addis Ababa and she advised the Government of Ethiopia on tax reform. In Rwanda, Giulia led a set of large-scale field experiments aimed to understand the determinants of tax compliance, and she continues to work on impact evaluations of tax policies. She is also Research Advisor to the Rwanda Revenue Authority, a member of TADAT’s Technical Advisory Group, and a Research Associate of the Institute of Fiscal Studies (UK).
- Tax Compliance in Rwanda: Evidence from a Message Field Experiment, with C. Nell, in Economic Development and Cultural Change (forthcoming)
- Can ICTs increase tax compliance? Evidence on taxpayer responses to technological innovation in Ethiopia, with A.T. Mengistu and F.B. Woldeyes, in Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 189 (September 2021)
- Trade Tax Evasion and the Tax Rate: Evidence from Transaction-level Trade Data, with A. T. Mengiustu and K. G. Molla, in Journal of African Economies (2021)
- Active Ghosts: Nil-filing in Rwanda, with F. Santoro, D. Mukama, J. Karangwa, and N. Hakizimana, in International Centre for Tax and Development Working Paper 106 (May 2020)
- Effective tax rates and firm size in Ethiopia, with A.T. Mengistu, in Development Policy Review 37:S2 (2019)
The course intends to familiarize students with key economic concepts underlying the basic process of economic growth and development and to familiarize students with some of the prominent theories and models associated with this debate. The course will examine (i) why countries grow and and develop (and other don't); (ii) the barriers to economic growth in poor countries; (iii) how these barriers can be overcome. In addition to standard approaches to economic development, the course looks at human capital and institutions as components in the growth process and briefly assesses the impacts of development aid on economic growth.
An important feature of the course is to help students apply theoretical concepts studied in class to particular developing countries. For this purpose each student will select one developing country and practice the application of conceptual approaches discussed in class.