Virtual asset regulation and tax revenue mobilisation in Sub-Saharan Africa: a panel analysis, 2019 to 2023

Abstract Sub-Saharan Africa combined high rates of grassroots cryptocurrency adoption with a large informal economy and low tax-to-GDP ratios, yet the region's regulatory response to virtual assets remained markedly uneven, ranging from outright prohibition to full licensing. This study constructed a verified, country-year panel covering up to 48 Sub-Saharan African economies over 2019 to 2023 to test whether a jurisdiction's virtual asset service provider (VASP) regulatory status was associated with tax revenue mobilisation, controlling for institutional quality and macroeconomic covariates. Regulatory status was verified against primary legal documents for 40 of 48 countries. Two originally intended predictors, cryptocurrency adoption rank and OECD Crypto-Asset Reporting Framework commitment, had limited public data coverage and were retained only as descriptive evidence. Across four panel specifications, including a system GMM check against reverse causality, VASP regulatory status showed no significant association with tax revenue as a share of GDP. A regional-bloc specification fitted the data better and identified trade openness, financial depth, and monetary-union membership as stronger correlates of tax revenue than any country's virtual asset rulebook. These findings suggested that the fiscal case for VASP regulation remained unproven within this five-year window, and that monetary-union architecture conditioned tax outcomes more strongly than crypto-specific policy. The study's principal contribution was a systematically dated and verified map of the region's virtual asset regulatory heterogeneity, offered alongside a transparent test of its as yet undetected fiscal effect.