Tax Facts

The Tax Foundation recently released the VAT Expansion and Labor Tax Cuts report.
The value-added tax (VAT) is a major source of revenue for EU countries. For Member States, it represents on average 17.8 percent of their total tax revenue. For the EU, VAT revenue represented roughly 7.5 percent of its total revenue in 2021.

Recently, New Zealand’s government was forced to drop its expensive plans to merge TVNZ and RNZ on which it planned to spend $3 million on rebranding alone.
The New Zealand Taxpayers’ Union has been at the forefront of the campaign against the merger. Far from creating a more diverse media landscape, the merger would have served to concentrate power, and erode diversity and trust in media sources.

Michael Jaeger, Taxpayers Association of EuroTaxpaype Secretary General, in an interview for the Sunt Förnuft, the magazine of the Swedish Taxpayers Association, discussed the current efforts of the EU to further expand its tax competence and at the same time massively increase EU spending.

The Tax Foundation released the 2022 Corporate Tax Rates around the World.

Here are the four main takeaways from this data-driven research and analysis:

Data on the decades-long decline: Over the past four decades, corporate tax rates around the world, including in the largest economies, have declined from an average of 40 percent to 23 percent as countries have recognized the impact that high corporate rates have on business investment decisions.

According to the Taxpayers’ Association of Finland, the total tax burden in Finland is estimated to be 42.7 percent of GDP, including national taxes, municipal and ecclesiastical, consumption taxes, and social security contributions.

On October 2nd, the Tax Foundation released the 2019 International Tax Competitiveness Index, which compares OECD countries on over 40 variables that measure how well each country’s tax system promotes sustainable economic growth and investment.

According to the calculations made by Contribuables Associés, the French taxpayers’ association, the ratio between public expenditure (State, local authorities, social security, European Union) and the wealth created in France (GDP) is 55.6% in 2019.

Tax Freedom Day in Austria was August 5th, according to the Austrian Economics Center.
Tax Freedom Day was July 1st in 1976. Since then, the tax burden has grown significantly, pushing the date to August 20th in 2001 and August 19th in 2015.

July 18th is when the Swedish taxpayers celebrated their Tax Freedom Day in 2018 according to the Swedish Taxpayers Association.

According to Asociación de Contribuyentes del Perú, the taxpayers in Peru are working 135 days to pay for the income tax, value-added tax, social security contributions and other local taxes.