The growth in tax collection and social contributions in 2021 raised the tax burden in Spain to 38.4% of GDP. It is 1.7 points higher than that of 2020. The increase triples the OECD average (0.5). Even so, the weight of taxes and contributions on the Spanish economy measured in terms of GDP remains below that of the large countries of the European Union such as Germany (39.5%), France (45.1%) and Italy ( 43.3%).
The strong growth in tax pressure occurred just the year before the debate opened this 2022 to lower taxes -especially personal income tax- through the deflation of income brackets. More than half of the autonomous communities have approved reductions in personal income tax and even some in Heritage (such as Andalusia and Galicia). In Catalonia they have not been touched.
While the central government has reduced taxation for high incomes, at the same time that new tax figures have been incorporated to energy companies, banks and large incomes.
Last year Spain was the sixth country where the tax burden grew the most. It is far from the first place it held in 2020, mainly as a result of the collapse in GDP registered due to the covid pandemic.
In 2021, the tax-to-GDP ratio increased in 24 of the countries for which complete data were available, remained unchanged in New Zealand and decreased in 11, with the largest declines in Hungary (-2.1), Mexico (-1.1) and Iceland (-1).
Denmark was the country with the highest tax burden in 2021, as the tax/GDP ratio was 46.9%, while Mexico had the lowest tax/GDP ratio at 16.7%.
In this way, Spain stood in thirteenth position among the 36 OECD countries for which data were available, in line with the position occupied in 2020, while in 2019 it had been eighteenth.
According to OECD data, since 2000 the tax burden in Spain has increased by 5.4 percentage points, from 33% to 38.4% in 2021, above the increase of 1.2 percentage points observed on average. among OECD economies, where the tax/GDP ratio was 32.9% in 2000, up from 34.1% in 2021.
On the other hand, taking 2020 as a reference, the OECD estimates that the greatest weight in Spain's tax revenue corresponded to Social Security contributions, with 37.4%, compared to the average of 26.6% for the OECD, while taxes on the income of individuals accounted for 23.7%, compared to 24.1% on average in the organization.
In the case of corporation tax, the weight of this tax in tax collection in Spain was 5.3%, compared to the 9% average for the OECD, while the contribution of property taxes in Spain represented the 6.7% of income, compared to the 5.7% average in the OECD.
For its part, the contribution of VAT stood at 17.1% in Spain, below the 20.2% of the international organization and the weight of other taxes on consumption was 9.6%, compared to 11 .9% of the OECD average.
