Has tax in the UK increased more than in other countries?

There’s a new OECD report with tax data going up to 2022.

The chart above shows that, whilst many countries saw a decline in tax revenues from 2021 to 2022, the UK saw a tax increase. However, the overall level of tax revenues in the UK, as a percentage of GDP, is very close to the OECD average.

That wasn’t always the case – in 1965 UK tax was relatively high by international standards:

Since then, UK tax increased a bit, but other countries increased their tax by a lot:

By 1990 it was much closer to the average (but higher than Spain:

And since 2000 we’ve been basically average:

How has the overall level of tax, as a % of GDP, changed from 2000 to 2022?

It’s gone up, but not markedly so. (Quick note: I would ignore the Irish figures, because the GDP is artificially inflated by multinational profit-shifting, and the Norwegian figures, as the tax is dominated by oil/gas revenues)

A similar picture if we look at developments since 2010:

So it’s not true to say that UK tax has increased significantly, compared to the rest of the world, since 2010.

But, more recently, it does seem that the UK has seen one of the largest tax increases in the world:

Important to remember the first chart at the top – these big increases are only taking us to very slightly above the OECD average. But if we wanted to tell a story about this, it might be that post-financial crisis many countries increased their tax levels significantly. Austerity UK did not…

… and we’re now playing catch-up.

Important to remember this is 2022 data – the large recent UK tax rises (particularly fiscal drag) have yet to kick in (together with their equivalents in other countries).