Even when the most basic terms of social, political, and economic life are shaken up, certain old patterns die hard. Indeed, if ever there was a time when domestic and international conditions would have seemed capable of producing convergence in the trajectory of tax state building in Brazil and South Africa, the last two decades of the 20th century were such a period. First, the two countries continued to be characterized by similar levels of economic and industrial development, and given the generally strong relationship between modernization factors and patterns of tax collection, there would have been good reason to predict that their tax policies and administrative practices would increasingly resemble those of one another. Second, in an era of globalization, the international economy has provided strong incentives for countries to conform to global norms of tax policy and administration. Given the prospect of the flight of skills and capital, policy makers have been bombarded with demands for lower taxes on mobile capital and for the simplification of complex tax systems. Finally, democratic transitions in both countries have provided openings for significant tax reform. For the first time, poor majorities have had the opportunity to express political opinions on questions of taxation in both countries. Although the conventional wisdom about the impact of democratization on taxation outcomes is less clear, at the very least one could certainly have predicted that similar political openings should have led to similar types of tax reforms in the two countries.