Public Finance & Tax Policy
How governments raise money, spend it, and decide what's worth it.
The applied public-finance specialization: designing and administering taxes, planning and managing public budgets, and appraising public spending with cost–benefit analysis. Built on the Kenyan and East African fiscal architecture.
By the end
- ✓Design a tax that is incidence-aware, efficient, and administrable
- ✓Read a national budget and trace money from appropriation to delivery
- ✓Run a cost–benefit appraisal of a public project end to end
- ✓Reason about devolution, the equitable share, and intergovernmental finance
- ✓Evaluate a tax or spending reform on revenue, equity, and efficiency
Prereqs
- •Microeconomics basics
- •Comfort with simple arithmetic and present value
Courses
Tax Policy & Administration
AdvancedHow to design a tax system that raises revenue without wrecking the economy — and how to actually collect it. Income, VAT, property, and corporate tax, the hard-to-tax informal sector, and the administration that determines whether any of it works.
Public Budgeting & Financial Management
IntermediateHow public money is planned, appropriated, spent, and accounted for. The budget cycle, classification, programme budgeting, execution and cash management, fiscal transparency, and the public-investment management that decides whether money becomes infrastructure.
Cost–Benefit Analysis & Project Appraisal
AdvancedThe discipline of deciding whether a public project is worth it. Welfare foundations, shadow pricing, social discounting, valuing the non-market, distributional weighting, and the marginal value of public funds — the analyst's toolkit for appraising spending.