Tax Myths » Contexts
One way to think about this is in terms of economic competitiveness. In recent years the World Economic Forum has scored most of the world’s countries on a competitiveness index that aims to assess the quality of nine components of a nation’s economy: public and private institutions, infrastructure, macro-economic policy, health and primary education, higher education and training, market efficiency, technological readiness, business sophistication, and innovation. The scores range from a low of 1 to a high of 7.
taxes1As the chart (right) suggests, as of 2007, the most recent year with available data, there’s no association across the world’s affluent countries between the level of taxation—the share of economic output (gross domestic product, or GDP) that passes through the government as taxes– and competitiveness.
