Revenue Statistics in Africa is a joint publication by the OECD Centre for Tax Policy and Administration, the OECD Development Centre, the African Tax Administration Forum and the African Union Commission, with the technical support of the African Development Bank, the World Customs Organisation and the Cercle de réflexion et d’échange des dirigeants des administrations fiscales and the financial support of the European Union.
The report presents detailed, internationally comparable data on both tax and non-tax revenues for 26 African countries. Its approach is based on the well-established methodology of the OECD Revenue Statistics database, which has become an essential reference source for OECD member countries and many more. Comparisons are also made with the average for OECD economies and for the economies featured in Revenue Statistics in Latin America and the Caribbean.
The term “taxes” in this publication is confined to “compulsory, unrequited payments to general government”. As outlined in the Interpretative Guide to the Revenue Statistics, taxes are “unrequited” in the sense that benefits provided by government to taxpayers are not normally in proportion to their payments. The OECD methodology classifies a tax according to its base: income, profits and capital gains (classified under heading 1000), payroll (heading 3000), property (heading 4000), goods and services (heading 5000) and other taxes (heading 6000). Compulsory social security contributions paid to general government are treated as taxes, and classified under heading 2000. Much greater detail on the tax concept and the classification of taxes are set out in the OECD Interpretative Guide in Annex Annex A.
The term “non-tax revenue” includes all general government revenue that does not meet the OECD definition of taxation. Revenues that do not constitute taxation include grants (e.g. foreign aid), returns on government market investments, rents on the extraction of resources from public lands, sales of government-produced goods and services, and the collection of fines and forfeits. More details on these types of revenues, as well as an explanation of the use of cash or accrual basis of reporting in the publication are available in Annex Annex B.
Chapter Chapter 1 and Chapter Chapter 2 of this report provide an overview of the main tax-revenue and non-tax revenue trends respectively in the 26 participating countries from 2000 to 2017. A special feature on the African Continental Free Trade Area Agreement and its impact on public revenues is contained in Chapter Chapter 3, while Chapter Chapter 4 explores the level of tax revenues by main tax categories and how the respective tax structures of the 26 countries have evolved since 1990. Chapters Chapter 5 and Chapter 6 contain detailed information on tax and non-tax revenues respectively on a country-by-country basis as well as a comparison of the non-tax revenue mix over time in the 26 countries.