Canada’s muted productivity growth during recent years has sparked concerns about the country’s investment climate. In this study, we develop a new natural language processing (NPL) based indicator, mining the richness of Twitter (now X) accounts to measure trends in the public perceptions of Canada’s investment climate. We find that while the Canadian investment climate appears to be generally favorable, there are signs of slippage in some categories in recent periods, such as with respect to governance and infrastructure. This result is confirmed by both survey-based and NLP-based indicators. We also find that our NLP-based indicators would suggest that perceptions of Canada’s investment climate are similar to perceptions of U.S. investment climate, except with respect to governance, where views of U.S. governance are notably more negative. Comparing our novel indicator relative to traditional survey-based indicators, we find that the NLP-based indicators are statistically significant in helping to predict investment flows, similar to survey-based measures. Meanwhile, the new NLP-based indicator offers insights into the nuances of data, allowing us to identify specific grievances. Finally, we construct a similar indicator for the U.S. and compare trends across countries.
This paper analyzes domestic revenue mobilization in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and offers options to strengthen it. Domestic revenue mobilization (DRM) in the DRC has improved during the Extended Credit Facility ECF program, standing at 13.7 percent over gross domestic product (GDP) in 2023, though it remains persistently low relative to peer countries. The recent improvements in revenue mobilization have been driven by stronger corporate income taxation (particularly stemming from the extractive sector). A comparison between DRC’s and peer countries’ tax structure points to significant room for boosting domestic revenues with stronger mobilization of personal income taxes, taxes on international trade and transactions and goods and services. In addition, the country’s tax potential (estimated on the basis of its structural characteristics and a stochastic frontier model) points to significant scope for improving tax-to-GDP ratio, by about 10 percentage points under more efficient tax policy and tax collection. Finally, tax administration reforms based on recommendations from the recently published the Tax Administration Diagnostic Assessment Tool report can significantly contribute to boosting DRM, with particular focus on tax-avoidance in the mining sector.