Resource information
Paying Taxes 2014 looks at tax regimes
in 189 economies as part of the Doing Business series. The
period covered by the study, 2004 to 2012, has seen the end
of a sustained period of economic growth, a severe recession
and a slow recovery. Governments continue to be under the
pressure balance the need to attract investment and foster
growth while generating tax revenues. This report finds that
governments continue to reform their tax systems despite
global economic uncertainty, with 32 economies having taken
steps from June last year through May 2013 to make it easier
and cost less for small and medium businesses to pay taxes.
The report finds that the most common tax reform undertaken
by 11 economies is the introduction or improvement of
electronic filing, eliminating the need for 74 separate tax
payments and reducing compliance time by almost 200 hours in
total. On average around the world it now takes our case
study company 268 hours to comply with its taxes, it makes
26.7 payments and has an average total tax rate of 43.1
percent. The range for each sub-indicator is very wide. The
number of payments ranges from 3 in Hong Kong SAR, China and
Saudi Arabia to 71 in República Bolivariana de Venezuela.
The time to comply is lowest in the United Arab Emirates
where it takes 12 hours to deal with the taxes that apply,
all of which are labor taxes. The highest number of hours is
still taken by our company in Brazil. It takes 2,600 hours
with more than half of this time being spent on consumption
taxes. Until 2008, 7 of the 8 geographical regions covered
in the report had consistently recorded a fall in their
average total tax rate. This changed in 2009 when only 5
regions recorded a fall. This fell to 3 in 2011 and in the
latest study only Africa and South America show a fall in
the total tax rate while all other regions show an increase
apart from Asia Pacific and EU and EFTA where rates of 36.6
percent and 42.5 percent respectively have been maintained.
Over the nine years of the study the total tax rate
attributable to profit taxes have fallen faster than that
for labor taxes so that labor taxes are now the largest
element of the total tax rate. While the average time to
comply has fallen by 55 hours over the 9 years of the study,
the rate of decline has slowed dramatically in the most
recent period, falling by only 1 hour between 2011 and 2012.
Over the nine years of study, the greatest improvement on
time has been seen for labor taxes (23 hours). The number of
hours has fallen by 19 hours for consumption taxes and by 13
hours for corporate income tax.
