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Taxation trends in the European Union
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The European Union is, taken as a whole, a high tax area. In 2007, the overall tax ratio, i.e. the sum of taxes and social security contributions in the 27 Member States (EU-27) amounted to 39.8 % of GDP (in the weighted average); this value is about 12 percentage points above those recorded in the United States and Japan. The EU tax-to-GDP ratio is high not only compared with these two countries but in general; amongst the major non-European OECD members, only New Zealand has a ratio that exceeds 35 per cent of GDP.
The high EU overall tax ratio is not new, dating back essentially to the last third of the 20th century. In those years, the role of the public sector became more extensive, leading to a strong upward trend in the tax ratio in the 1970s, and to a lesser extent also in the 1980s and early 1990s. In the later 1990s, first the Maastricht Treaty and then the Stability and Growth Pact encouraged EU Member States to adopt a series of fiscal consolidation packages. In some Member States, the consolidation process relied primarily on restricting or scaling back primary public expenditures, in others the focus was rather on increasing taxes (in some cases temporarily). At the end of that decade, a number of countries took advantage of buoyant tax revenues to reduce the tax burden, through cuts in the personal income tax, social contributions, but also in the corporate income tax.
Eurostat - Organizational Body
978-92-79-11171-6
NONE
Management
English
2009
1-391
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