Identifying the Rich:
 Civil Registration and State-Building in Tanzania

• In Event: The Politics of Identity Documents in the Global South

Abstract

Much of the world’s poor remain invisible and uncounted by the state. How does the possession of legal identity documents, through civil registration, affect access and exposure to the state? I suggest that an exclusionary logic underpins civil registration in much of the developing world due to incentives that tend towards the registration of the rich over the poor. As a result, in countries at the very lowest levels of enrollment, the returns to identity documents are structured to provide ‘regressive’ benefits that generate striking inequalities in access to the state. I provide evidence on these returns in Tanzania during a key period of state-building. Leveraging a natural experiment arising from district-level reforms to compulsory birth registration, I show these reforms led to substantial increases in the possession of legal identity documents. Then, using the reforms as an instrument, I provide causal evidence on the returns. These are substantial but narrowly focused: registration increases the probability that citizens have higher education, work in the formal economic sector, and pay taxes. I interpret the results by characterising citizens induced to be formalized and demonstrate the responsiveness of registration decisions to the threat of taxation. The results suggest one channel through which nominally universal state-building schemes can have highly regressive distributional consequences.

Author

• Jeremy Bowles, Harvard University