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Angola experienced an extraordinary oil boom between 2004 and 2014. During this period, oil revenue accounted for 80% of all government revenue. In 2011, the Government of Angola started implementing a non-oil tax reform. The main objective of this reform was to reduce the Government's dependency on oil revenues by broadening the tax base and improving tax administration. This paper examines the achievements of the Angolan tax reform with respect to revenue generation. We find that the non-oil tax revenues, as a share of total revenue, have increased since the reform was initiated, largely due to the fall in oil revenues since 2014. However, the share of non-oil taxes to GDP remains mostly the same today as at the beginning of the oil boom. The reform has not effectuated any fundamental shift in state-society relations. A regime that has been fueled by massive revenues from natural resource extraction cannot easily alter state-society relations through a major tax reform without threatening the stability of the regime. Developing the non-oil tax system remains as urgent today as it was when the tax reform started.

Google the Covane Community Lodge – at the banks of Lake Massingir in the province of Gaza in Mozambique – and find photos of wine glasses held against African bush sunsets, some nice scenery and r...

This article challenges the widespread view that since 1992 Mozambique has been a development success. The triple transition—to civil peace, multi-party democracy and a free market economy—is assessed from a historical-institutional perspective. Neopatrimonialism—the confusion between the public and private interests, resulting in the personalisation of power, privatisation of the state and ‘businessification’ of politics—is seen as the main logic driving the activities of the elite classes. Neopatrimonialism poses problems for inter-elite trust-building, and hence democratisation from above. Drawing on key Mozambican scholars such as Brazao Mazula and Carlos Serra as well as on their own research on democratisation and local government reform, the authors identify three trends in the recent history of a country marked by power struggles between the ruling and the opposition party (Frelimo and Renamo). These are: democratisation (dominant from 1990 to 1994), repatrimonialisation (salient from 1995)' and d...