The first edition of the OECD publication Revenue Statistics in Africa presents statistics relating to eight countries that represent around a quarter of Africa’s GDP. The countries studied in this edition are Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Mauritius, Morocco, Rwanda, Senegal, South Africa and Tunisia.

The statistics show that based on the tax to GDP ratios in 2014 the countries fall into two groups. Morocco, South Africa and Tunisia have tax to GDP ratios between 28% and 31% while the other countries included in the publication have tax to GDP ratios between 16% and 20%. It should be noted that all the countries represented in the study have tax to GDP ratios below 34.4% which is the OECD average. The study notes that countries with higher levels of GDP per capital are also more likely to have higher tax to GDP ratios and this is generally the case with these countries.

The commentary on the revenue statistics notes that the tax to GDP ratios in these countries have increased as tax systems have been reformed and tax administrations have been modernized. Between the years 2000 and 2014 increases in the tax to GDP ratio of more than 4% have taken place in Morocco, Rwanda, South Africa and Tunisia. The other countries also experienced increases in their tax to GDP ratios although to a lesser extent.

The increase in the tax to GDP ratios has resulted mainly from increased tax on income and profits as a percentage of GDP, and especially from increases in the amount of corporate income tax revenue collected. In most of these African countries the contribution of corporate income tax to total tax revenue is higher than the OECD average of 8.5%.

Value added tax (VAT) revenue is also an important source of government revenue in these African countries and these revenues increased in the period from 2000 to 2014 in some of the countries. Specific consumption taxes such as excises and import duties have either decreased substantially or increased slightly as a result of the opening up of the economies and reduction of trade barriers.

Some of the countries benefited from increases in non-tax revenues. These revenues were mainly grants from foreign aid or income from property. It should however be noted that these non-government revenues are more volatile over time than tax revenues.