Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses the barriers to fiscal expansion in Bolivia. It demonstrates how a significant hurdle lies not with the unwilling taxpayers, but rather with a complex set of barriers that are produced by the local government and economy.

Paper long abstract:

The story we often hear about taxes is one of nation−states attempting to collect them and populations responding to this demand by either fulfilling their fiscal 'obligations', or making efforts to avoid them. Ethnographic data collected in the peri−urban areas of the Bolivian city of Cochabamba, populated mainly by recent, 'indigenous' migrants from the rural areas, describes a more complex reality. Here, the national taxes collected by the central tax office (SIN) are indeed evaded by this job insecure, low-income population. However, municipal taxes are something that they are eager to pay and save up for, but due a range of bureaucratic and socio-economic reasons are regularly obstructed from paying. While the national taxation scheme in Bolivia is an exchange of money derived from labour, capital, and trade, for services; municipal taxes are an exchange of cash (based on capital) for rights - the right to work, live, have recourse to the law, and be designated part of the 'official' city. As a result of their fiscal exclusion, these denied taxpayers of Cochabamba are unable to engage in society as 'full citizens'. This is something that does not sit well with the government's visions of a fiscal future ostensibly predicated on broad inclusion and indigenous notions of moral exchange and solidarity. This paper moves away from simplistic assumptions regarding the barriers to fiscal expansion, such as the unwillingness of people to pay, to a more nuanced discussion of the various forms of exchanges implied within a fiscal system.