Although Senegal has made considerable economic progress, seeing increased growth rates over the last six years, the director of the IMF’s Africa department urged the country tp work to create fiscal space to sustain this growth.
Abebe Aemro Selassie said: “Senegal has made impressive progress implementing its comprehensive Plan Senegal Emergent in recent years, engendering high economic growth, poverty reduction, and improvements in standards of living.
“Going forward, it will be important to enhance tax revenue mobilisation to sustain much needed development spending and maintain debt sustainability.”
Plan Senegal Emergent is a policy of president Macky Sall’s government, and aims to transform the economy, improve the wellbeing of the population and support security, stability and good governance.
Data published last year showed that tax and revenue collection in Africa has generally continued to improve across the region.
The average tax-to-GDP ratio for the 16 countries studied was 19.1% in 2015, an increase of 0.4% since the year before.
Statistics released in October by the OECD and other bodies looked at domestic revenue mobilisation in: Cabo Verde, Cameroon, Democratic Republic of Congo, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Kenya, Mauritius, Morocco, Niger, Rwanda, Senegal, South Africa, Swaziland, Togo, Tunisia and Uganda.
“While African countries have made significant efforts to strengthen their tax policy and tax administration capacity, they continue to face the challenges of large informal sectors, and a narrow tax base, particularly in resource-rich countries that makes them vulnerable to unstable resource revenues,” the OECD said.
