Tax revenues as a share of GDP
What you should know about this indicator
- Taxes are defined as compulsory, unrequited payments to the government, following IMF and OECD definitions.
- Resource taxes (mostly related to oil and mining) are not systematically defined or captured in the data.
- Social contributions include both compulsory and voluntary social insurance contributions from employers, employees, and the self-employed.
Related research and writing
Sources and processing
This data is based on the following sources
How we process data at Our World in Data
All data and visualizations on Our World in Data rely on data sourced from one or several original data providers. Preparing this original data involves several processing steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing country names and world region definitions, converting units, calculating derived indicators such as per capita measures, as well as adding or adapting metadata such as the name or the description given to an indicator.
At the link below you can find a detailed description of the structure of our data pipeline, including links to all the code used to prepare data across Our World in Data.
Notes on our processing step for this indicator
The source provides their data with caution notes, classifying them as follows:
- Accuracy, quality or comparability of data questionable.
- Un-excluded resource revenues/taxes are significant but cannot be isolated from total revenue/taxes.
- Un-excluded resource revenue/taxes are marginal but non-negligible and cannot be isolated from total revenue/taxes.
- Inconsistencies with social contributions.
We have excluded from our dataset the observations flagged with caution note 1.
Reuse this work
- All data produced by third-party providers and made available by Our World in Data are subject to the license terms from the original providers. Our work would not be possible without the data providers we rely on, so we ask you to always cite them appropriately (see below). This is crucial to allow data providers to continue doing their work, enhancing, maintaining and updating valuable data.
- All data, visualizations, and code produced by Our World in Data are completely open access under the Creative Commons BY license. You have the permission to use, distribute, and reproduce these in any medium, provided the source and authors are credited.
Citations
How to cite this page
To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by Our World in Data, please use the following citation:
“Data Page: Tax revenues as a share of GDP”, part of the following publication: Esteban Ortiz-Ospina and Max Roser (2016) - “Taxation”. Data adapted from UNU-WIDER. Retrieved from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/tax-revenues-as-a-share-of-gdp-unu-wider [online resource]
How to cite this data
In-line citationIf you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:
UNU-WIDER Government Revenue Dataset (2023) – with major processing by Our World in Data
Full citation
UNU-WIDER Government Revenue Dataset (2023) – with major processing by Our World in Data. “Tax revenues as a share of GDP – UNU-WIDER” [dataset]. UNU-WIDER, “Government Revenue Dataset (GRD) 2023” [original data]. Retrieved September 7, 2024 from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/tax-revenues-as-a-share-of-gdp-unu-wider