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I have been looking for statistics on tax revenue to GDP ratio of different countries. I've found it on World Bank website.

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/GC.TAX.TOTL.GD.ZS?view=chart

which claims that it is 11.5% for Germany (2018) for example. Then I have seen this page from OECD website

https://www.oecd.org/tax/revenue-statistics-germany.pdf

which claims that it is 38.5% for Germany (2018). How come there's such a huge difference between these two sources? Is there something I'm getting wrong here? How can there be 27% difference, OECD number is more than 3 times world bank number! Can anyone enlighten me please?

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  • $\begingroup$ 11.5% is implausibly low and so may be measuring something else. The German government says "In 2017, Germany’s tax ratio – i.e. the ratio of taxes and social security contributions to gross domestic product (GDP) – stood at 37.5%." It may be a "social security" issue (though excluding that the figure would be 23.3%), or something else $\endgroup$
    – Henry
    Commented Dec 5, 2020 at 20:51
  • $\begingroup$ The only thing that makes sense is that the 11% figure is the federal (central) government, while the 38% is “general government” - all levels of government. For apples-to-apples comparisons, you want general government, since different countries have different splits. You would need to dig and find the series definition; I could not find it on the web page linked to. $\endgroup$
    – Brian Romanchuk
    Commented Dec 6, 2020 at 16:03

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