Public finance economist part of team to assess South African tax system

Dr Monkam obtained a PhD in Economics from the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies at Georgia State University in the USA and is a public finance economist with at least six years of working experience in research and policy analysis in the areas of public sector reforms, mainly related to taxation and revenue administration, intergovernmental fiscal relations, subnational government finance, and fiscal decentralisation. Her experience also covers teaching and training in the areas of public economics, fiscal decentralisation, and local governance.

Dr Monkam’s working experience started in 2004 as a research assistant for the International Center for Public Policy (formerly the International Studies Program) at the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies where she conducted research on the assignment of expenditure responsibilities to different levels of government. In 2006, she was appointed as a fiscal research economist at the Fiscal Research Center of Georgia State University where she prepared fiscal notes for the Georgia State Legislature and authored policy briefs and reports on issues confronting the local governments and the state of Georgia. In 2008, she became a research fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy (Cambridge, Massachusetts) and the African Tax Institute where she led the policy and analytical dialogue on the comprehensive property-related taxes research project in two African countries, Senegal and Gabon.

In 2009, she joined the Department of Economics at the University of Pretoria as senior lecturer where she lectures Public Economics and Taxation at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels. At the African Tax Institute she assists in providing quality training and building tax policy and tax administration capacity within the public sector on the African continent. She also supervises thesis projects of students pursuing their master’s and PhD degrees in Taxation and Public Economics.

The Tax Review Committee has been tasked, among other things, with assessing whether the South African tax system is able to generate sufficient and sustainable revenues to fund the state’s current and future expenditure priorities, including the National Health Insurance plan. It will also examine the mix between direct taxes, indirect taxes, provincial taxes, local taxes, the long-term sustainability of the overall ratio of tax to gross domestic product and the specific ratios for personal income tax, corporate income tax and value-added tax (VAT). Mining taxes will also be reviewed and the Committee will advise on the effectiveness of dual rates of VAT.