In “Taxation and Development – Again”, Michael Keen of the IMF offers a wonderful overview of the burning issues in taxation and development that have attracted attention and concern by tax administrators, policy-makers, scholars, and international bodies like the IMF for the last seventy or so years. The piece is worth reading because it provides a succinct “state of the union” review of the big ideas of development in tax; it offers a worthy plea about the need for much more empirically-grounded, specifically-oriented, work in the “development” area; and it bridges the connections between academic scholarship in the development area and the complexities of translating that work into tangible and implementable policy action at the local and domestic levels. The paper is also a good reminder that some terrific scholarship is undertaken outside the bounds of the formal academy.