The Impact of Trade Liberalisation on Tax Revenue in Ghana: A Co-Integration Analysis.

There is ambiguity in the literature on the impact of trade liberalization on tax revenue and this tends to be one of the major concerns of developing countries in opening up their economies. This paper therefore explored how the trade liberalisation policy agenda is consistent with meeting the revenue objective of developing countries using Ghana as a case study. It used the Autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) model to find the impact of trade liberalisation on total tax revenue in Ghana using time series data from 1980 to 2010. It found that trade liberalisation had positive significant impact on tax revenue in Ghana. The study concluded that trade liberalization increased tax revenue and that developing countries should open their economies without any fear of losing tax revenue.