On the 5th of May 2022 during the autumn graduation ceremony of the Faculty of Economic Management Sciences, Professor Sijbren Cnossen who is associated with the African Tax Institute was conferred an honourary doctorate for his outstanding contribution to the field of tax and public finance.

 

For his inaugural lecture on excise taxation:

 

More on Professor Sijbren Cnossen:

Sijbren Cnossen is an academic partner of the CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis and a professor emeritus of Erasmus University Rotterdam (tax law) and the University of Maastricht (economics). He held appointments at the Law Schools of Harvard, the New York University and the University of Florida at the College of Europe, and the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies. He also served as an alternate judge in a regional Dutch tax court and as an extraordinary professor in the African Tax Institute of the University of Pretoria from 2009 to 2020.

Professor Cnossen started his career as an inspector of taxes with the Dutch Tax Service. Subsequently, he joined the Fiscal Affairs Department of the International Monetary Fund. Over the years, he has advised some 30 countries on the design of their tax systems under the auspices of the IMF, the World Bank, the OECD, the European Commission and the Harvard Tax Advisory Team for Indonesia.

Indicative of his monumental international standing, Professor Cnossen wrote and edited some 30 books, journal issues and monographs, including Modernizing VATs in Africa and Excise Tax Policy and Administration in Southern African Countries. He authored about 250 articles on a wide range of tax issues, and country reports on African countries including Botswana, the East African Community, the Gambia, Nigeria, South Africa and Zambia.

The Erasmus School of Economics in Rotterdam named the Sijbren Cnossen Chair in Public Economics after him. He is a Knight in the Order of the Dutch Lion.