IMF/WB Domestic Revenue Mobilization Enters Urgent Phase

Domestic revenue mobilization has been part of the international development agenda for many years. Finance ministries, the IMF, the World Bank and development institutions have spent much of the past decade asking how countries can strengthen their own revenue systems and finance more of their development domestically. What feels different in 2026 is the pressure surrounding that discussion. Debt servicing is absorbing more public resources, development assistance is under strain, investment needs remain substantial and governments are being asked to deliver more with increasingly limited fiscal room.

That is one of the issues I will be following closely on behalf of The RegTech, in Bangkok in October, where I will be participating around the IMF and World Bank Group Annual Meetings, taking place from October 12 to 18. My program on the sidelines will also include CNN Global Perspectives, the inaugural Asian edition of CNN’s live-event series, bringing together political leaders, international institutions and senior business figures to discuss the economic, technological and geopolitical forces shaping Asia. The speaker line-up includes Thailand’s Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul, IMF Deputy Managing Director Bo Li, World Trade Organization Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala and Bank of Korea Governor Hyun Song Shin, alongside senior business leaders including Grab co-founder and Group CEO Anthony Tan and DBS Group CEO Tan Su Shan.

The conversation on domestic revenue mobilization will therefore be familiar in subject, although increasingly different in substance. The question is becoming less about finding new taxes and more about how governments use the systems they already have: how effectively they identify economic activity, how broad their tax bases really are, how many exemptions they tolerate, how consistently they enforce liabilities and how much confidence citizens have that the system treats people fairly.

The fiscal pressure is difficult to ignore. Aid from major donors fell by more than 23% in the latest year covered by the World Bank’s recent analysis. Tax revenue, meanwhile, has barely changed since 2010 in many developing economies, remaining around 10% of GDP in low-income countries, 13% in lower-middle-income countries and 19% in upper-middle-income economies.

Technology is becoming more important because it changes what governments can actually see. Electronic invoicing, digital filing, taxpayer identification, payment systems and administrative data can reveal economic activity that was previously fragmented across paper records, separate agencies or informal transactions. The results can be significant. Digital property identification helped double property-tax collections in Ghana, while electronic sales registers increased VAT revenue in Ethiopia by almost 50%.

Yet the more important lesson is that data alone does not create tax capacity. E-invoice information can remain unused because an administration lacks the ability to analyse it. Registration systems can expand without producing additional revenue. Digital tools still require reliable registries, trained officials, appropriate laws, data governance, taxpayer services and credible enforcement.

For Israel and the wider Middle East, this discussion deserves closer attention. The region contains very different fiscal models. World Bank data place average tax revenue across the Middle East and North Africa at about 13.2% of GDP for 2018-22, while Israel appears among economies collecting more than 20% of GDP in tax and is classified among countries with stronger structural fundamentals. Jordan sits in the 15-20% range, while several Gulf economies fall below 15%, reflecting systems in which non-tax revenues have historically played a much larger role.

Israel enters this debate from a relatively mature position. Its economy is highly digital, its institutions have substantial technical capacity and its tax administration operates across a broad formal economy. The next questions are therefore more precise. How much more can governments learn from transaction-level data? How should information move between public institutions? Where should automation support human judgment? And how can greater visibility coexist with privacy, accountability and public confidence?

Trust remains central to all of this. Jordan’s 2018 income-tax reform, which was withdrawn and revised following public opposition, is a useful regional reminder that fiscal reforms can fail even when the arithmetic behind them appears sound. People judge tax systems through fairness, consistency and what they see the state delivering in return.

These are some of the questions I will be taking with me to Bangkok. Domestic revenue mobilization may be an established policy agenda, but the environment around it is changing quickly. Over the coming weeks, I will look more closely at what that change means in practice: how technology affects what governments can see, how administrations turn information into revenue, and why trust may determine whether reform lasts.