Effect of central transfers on municipalities' own revenue mobilization: Do conflict and local revenue management matter?

This paper analyzes the effect of the transfers from central government to municipalities on the revenue mobilization by municipalities in Côte d’Ivoire over the period 2001-2014. The analysis is based on a new carefully-constructed dataset covering the conflict and post conflict periods for 115 municipalities. A two-stage least squares estimator is combined with the Grouped Fixed Effects estimator to address a potential endogeneity bias and to allow for unobserved heterogeneity varying over time. The results show a statistically significant and positive effect of central transfers on revenue mobilization by municipalities for both tax revenue and non-tax revenue. The effect of transfers is found to be higher for tax revenue than for non-tax revenue. The conflict eroded the capacity of municipalities to raise revenue. During the conflict, a 10 percent increase in transfers is associated with a 3.3 percent increase in revenue mobilized by municipalities, while this increase reaches 5.9 percent after the conflict.