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Data

Tax revenues as a share of GDP

UNU-WIDER
See all data and research on:
TaxationState Capacity

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.

How is this data described by its producer - UNU-WIDER?

The variable Taxes captures tax collected regardless of sources (i.e., unless otherwise defined, this includes resource-based taxes). These follow the definition of taxes found in both the IMF’ Government Finance Statistics Manual (GFSM) and OECD Revenue Statistics Interpretive Guide as ‘compulsory, unrequited …’ payments to the government (IMF 2014; OECD 2020).

The Taxes variables presents aggregate indicators that capture all tax revenue as defined above. Resource taxes typically present taxes levied on natural resource extraction, although differ across territories. Resource Taxes are not (systematically) defined or captured in the OECD Revenue Statistics, and not captured at all in the IMF’s GFS, thus do not have a separate code for either publication.

Social contributions include both compulsory and voluntary social insurance contributions from employers, employees, and the self-employed.

Source
UNU-WIDER Government Revenue Dataset (2023) – with major processing by Our World in Data
Last updated
November 1, 2023
Next expected update
May 2026
Date range
1980–2022
Unit
% of GDP

Related research and writing

A dark blue background with a lighter blue world map superimposed over it. Yellow text that says Taxation by Our World in Data

Taxation

Esteban Ortiz-Ospina and Max Roser

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Sources and processing

This data is based on the following sources

UNU-WIDER – Government Revenue Dataset (GRD)

The GRD aims to present a complete picture of government revenue and tax trends over time and allows for analysis at the country, regional or cross-country level. Where possible, figures are expressed both inclusive and exclusive of natural resource revenues, which helps to overcome a major obstacle to cross-country comparisons in existing data sources.

Retrieved on
November 1, 2023
Retrieved from
https://www.wider.unu.edu/project/grd-government-revenue-dataset
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
UNU-WIDER Government Revenue Dataset. Version 2023. https://doi.org/10.35188/UNU-WIDER/GRD-2023

The GRD aims to present a complete picture of government revenue and tax trends over time and allows for analysis at the country, regional or cross-country level. Where possible, figures are expressed both inclusive and exclusive of natural resource revenues, which helps to overcome a major obstacle to cross-country comparisons in existing data sources.

Retrieved on
November 1, 2023
Retrieved from
https://www.wider.unu.edu/project/grd-government-revenue-dataset
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
UNU-WIDER Government Revenue Dataset. Version 2023. https://doi.org/10.35188/UNU-WIDER/GRD-2023

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.

Read about our data pipeline
Notes on our processing step for this indicator

The source provides their data with caution notes, classifying them as follows:

  1. Accuracy, quality or comparability of data questionable.
  2. Un-excluded resource revenues/taxes are significant but cannot be isolated from total revenue/taxes.
  3. Un-excluded resource revenue/taxes are marginal but non-negligible and cannot be isolated from total revenue/taxes.
  4. 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://pop-pyramid.owid.pages.dev:8789/20260304-094028/grapher/tax-revenues-as-a-share-of-gdp-unu-wider.html [online resource] (archived on March 4, 2026).

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 April 11, 2026 from https://pop-pyramid.owid.pages.dev:8789/20260304-094028/grapher/tax-revenues-as-a-share-of-gdp-unu-wider.html (archived on March 4, 2026).

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Data API

Use these URLs to programmatically access this chart's data and configure your requests with the options below. Our documentation provides more information on how to use the API, and you can find a few code examples below.

Data URL (CSV format)
https://pop-pyramid.owid.pages.dev/grapher/tax-revenues-as-a-share-of-gdp-unu-wider.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false
Metadata URL (JSON format)
https://pop-pyramid.owid.pages.dev/grapher/tax-revenues-as-a-share-of-gdp-unu-wider.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false

Code examples

Examples of how to load this data into different data analysis tools.

Excel / Google Sheets
=IMPORTDATA("https://pop-pyramid.owid.pages.dev/grapher/tax-revenues-as-a-share-of-gdp-unu-wider.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")
Python with Pandas
import pandas as pd
import requests

# Fetch the data.
df = pd.read_csv("https://pop-pyramid.owid.pages.dev/grapher/tax-revenues-as-a-share-of-gdp-unu-wider.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", storage_options = {'User-Agent': 'Our World In Data data fetch/1.0'})

# Fetch the metadata
metadata = requests.get("https://pop-pyramid.owid.pages.dev/grapher/tax-revenues-as-a-share-of-gdp-unu-wider.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false").json()
R
library(jsonlite)

# Fetch the data
df <- read.csv("https://pop-pyramid.owid.pages.dev/grapher/tax-revenues-as-a-share-of-gdp-unu-wider.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")

# Fetch the metadata
metadata <- fromJSON("https://pop-pyramid.owid.pages.dev/grapher/tax-revenues-as-a-share-of-gdp-unu-wider.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")
Stata
import delimited "https://pop-pyramid.owid.pages.dev/grapher/tax-revenues-as-a-share-of-gdp-unu-wider.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", encoding("utf-8") clear