TAX revenues in Asia and the Pacific returned to their levels prior to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2022 amid a rebound in tourism and higher commodity prices, according to a new OECD report.

Revenue Statistics in Asia and the Pacific 2024, released today at a meeting of the Asia Initiative of the Global Forum on Transparency and Exchange of Information for Tax Purposes in Yerevan, Armenia, shows that in 2022 tax-to-GDP ratios increased in almost two-thirds of the economies covered by the report.

This 11th edition of the report provides harmonised data on tax revenue for 36 economies in the region, including, for the first time, Azerbaijan, Hong Kong (China), Kiribati, the Marshall Islands, Sri Lanka and Timor-Leste.

The average tax-to-GDP ratio in the Asia-Pacific region increased by 0.6 percentage points (p.p.) in 2022 to 19.3%, the same level as in 2019, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. In comparison, the average tax-to-GDP ratio in the OECD declined by 0.2 p.p. to 34.0% in 2022, while the average for Latin America and the Caribbean rose by 0.3 p.p. to 21.5%. Africa’s average tax-to-GDP ratio was 15.6% in 2021.

Tax-to-GDP ratios ranged from 7.4% in Sri Lanka to 33.8% in New Zealand in 2022 across the 34 economies in the Asia-Pacific region for which data for 2022 is available. In Australia and Japan, the tax-to-GDP ratio in 2021 was 29.5% and 34.1% respectively, in both cases 1.1 p.p. higher than the previous year.

The largest increases in the tax-to-GDP ratio in 2022 occurred in Kyrgyzstan (3.1 p.p.), Kazakhstan (4.2 p.p.), Vanuatu (5.0 p.p.) and Timor-Leste (5.3 p.p.), while the largest declines occurred in the Cook Islands (4.7 p.p.) and Nauru (6.7 p.p.).