Despite the evident and contemporaneous concurrences in the
political-economy and governance histories of Nigeria and Ghana,
scholarly attention devoted to comparative interrogation of the public
finance and the governance in the states is at low ebb. In this paper,
we draw conceptual insights from public economics discourses of taxation
and governance to argue that people-centered revenue profile relates
significantly with comparative performances of government institutions.
Matrix data were obtained from sampled respondents in Nigeria and Ghana
and analysed for percentage analysis to validate the research
conjectures. As predicted, the nexus between taxation and governance was
generally weak, but nevertheless stronger in Ghana than Nigeria. In
addition, the regulatory mechanisms for tax administration related
positively to determine the nexus between taxation and governance in the
study area. In addition, the study demonstrated a divergence in the
states' political economies as well as in their regulatory mechanisms
for taxation. Also, incentives played a key role in shaping the
relationship between taxation and governance. Nevertheless, tax
incentives fostered a weak positive relationship for taxation and
governance in Nigeria and Ghana even though such appears stronger in the
latter than the former.