On 5 December 2019 the 2019 edition of the Revenue Statistics was released by the OECD. The publication shows that the average tax-to-GDP ratio in the OECD countries was 34.3% in 2018, almost the same as the ratio of 34.2% in 2017.
In the United States the important tax reform led to a significant fall in tax revenues from 26.8% of GDP in 2017 to 24.3% in 2018. The reforms led to a fall of 0.7 percentage points in corporate income tax revenues and a fall of 0.5 percentage points in personal income tax revenues.
Four OECD countries including France and Belgium had tax-to-GDP ratios above 43% in 2018 and four other EU countries including Italy and Austria also recorded tax-to-GDP ratios above 40% . The study also shows that five OECD member countries including Ireland, the US and Turkey had tax to GDP ratios under 25%. However most OECD countries had a tax-to-GDP ratio generally between 30% and 40% of GDP in 2018.
Corporate income tax revenues increased to 9.3% of total tax revenues across the OECD in 2017. The proportion of social security contributions in the total tax revenues continued to fall, dropping to 26% in 2017.
A Special Feature relating to environmentally related tax revenues notes that these accounted for an average of 6.9% of total tax revenues in OECD countries in 2017. The most important contribution to environmentally related tax revenues comes from energy taxes which account for nearly three-quarters of these revenues.
