Mazhar Waseem

Mazhar Waseem is a Reader in Economics at the University of Manchester. The main theme of his research is why modern broad-based taxes – income tax and VAT – that raise the bulk of taxes in rich countries perform poorly in developing countries. He has exploited quasi-experimental variation and rich administrative data from Pakistan to investigate the role of tax policy – tax rates and tax bases – and information environment – self-reporting vs. third-party reporting, informality – in shaping the compliance behavior of agents in low tax capacity setting. One recurring conclusion that emerges from his research is that many standard economic results derived in developed country settings do not hold in settings where informality is pervasive, evasion widespread, and enforcement capacity week. A corollary of the result is that the existing tax policy advice to developing countries is not suited to their tax environment and needs to be tailored to reflect compliance environment there. Before starting his research career, Mazhar served for ten years in the tax administration of Pakistan, where he supervised the collection and enforcement of Customs, Excises, and VAT and contributed to the development of Information Technology infrastructure of the department. He holds an MSc and a Ph.D. in economics from the London School of Economics.