The Determinants of Tax Revenue and Tax Effort in Developed and Developing Countries: Theory and New Evidence 1995-2015

Marcelo Piancastelli and Anthony Thirlwall

Studies in Economics from School of Economics, University of Kent

Abstract: This paper measures the tax effort of a sample of fifty-nine developed and developing countries over the period 1995-2015 by comparing a country’s actual tax/GDP ratio with the ratio predicted derived from an international tax function which relates tax revenue to various measures of a country’s taxable capacity such as the level of per capita income; the share of trade in GDP; the productive structure, and the level of financial deepening. The tax function is estimated using cross section data; pooled time series/cross section data, and panel data using a fixed effects estimator. The results are compared and show a range of tax effort from South Africa with the highest effort and Switzerland with the lowest effort. Implications for policy are drawn.

Keywords: Tax ratios; tax effort (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H2 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-pbe, nep-pke and nep-pub
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.kent.ac.uk/economics/repec/1903.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ukc:ukcedp:1903

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Studies in Economics from School of Economics, University of Kent School of Economics, University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent, CT2 7FS.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Dr Anirban Mitra ().