Effective Tax rates and Fiscal Convergence in the OECD: 1965-2001

In this work we elaborate a data base that includes 21 OECD countries along the 1965-2001 period. It includes average effective tax rates on consumption, capital and labour, which are adequate to analyse macroeconomic effects of fiscal policy. Additionally, we make a description of the most important features of fiscal structures in OECD countries along the last decades. Thus, we find that the ratio of fiscal revenues to GDP has steadily increased in these countries, mainly due to the increase of taxation on labour earnings. This increase in fiscal revenues has gone together with a process of convergence across countries both in the level of fiscal revenues, as in labour and capital tax rates. However, consumption tax rates, which have not been converging across OECD countries, present a clear convergence pattern across European countries since the beginning of the eighties.