Did they learn to tax? : taxation trends outside the OECD

Abstract

We map trends of tax policy change in developing countries and transition economies since the 1980s, compare them to tax trends in the advanced Western democracies and review some of the explanations offered by the contributions to this volume. We find that non-Western countries follow the lead of Western countries in some important respects but not in others. While non-Western countries brought their general revenues closer to Western levels and copied important features of Western consumption taxation including higher value added tax revenues and lower revenues from trade taxation, they failed to emulate the hallmark of 20th-century Western taxation: a strong and progressive personal income tax. The taxation trends are closely associated with socio-economic changes (as summarized by GDP per capita) and structural factors (as summarized by country size). Yet the impact of political institutions on taxation is non-linear and complex.