Revenue Statistics in Africa 2024 is a joint publication by the OECD Centre for Tax Policy and Administration, the OECD Development Centre, the African Union Commission and the African Tax Administration Forum (ATAF) , with technical support from the African Development Bank and the Cercle de réflexion et d’échange des dirigeants des administrations fiscales and with financial support from the governments of Ireland, Japan, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and from the European Union.
The report presents detailed, internationally comparable data on tax and non-tax revenues for 36 African countries. Its approach is based on the well-established methodology of the OECD Interpretative Guide, which has become an essential reference for OECD members and many non-member countries, and which is contained in this report as Annex A. Comparisons are also made with the average for OECD economies and for the economies featured in Revenue Statistics in Latin America and the Caribbean and Revenue Statistics in Asia and the Pacific.
The term “taxes” in this publication is confined to “compulsory, unrequited payments to general government”. Taxes are “unrequited” in the sense that benefits provided by government to taxpayers are not normally in proportion to their payments. The OECD methodology classifies a tax according to its base: income, profits and capital gains (classified under heading 1000), payroll (heading 3000), property (heading 4000), goods and services (heading 5000), and other taxes (heading 6000). Compulsory social security contributions paid to general government are treated as taxes and classified under heading 2000. The concept and classification of taxes are set out in greater detail in Annex A.
The term “non-tax revenues” includes all general government revenues that do not meet the OECD definition of taxation. Revenues that do not constitute taxation include grants (e.g. foreign aid), returns on government market investments, rents on the extraction of resources from public lands, sales of government-produced goods and services, and the collection of fines and forfeits. More details on these types of revenues are provided in Annex B.
Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 of this report provide an overview of the main trends in tax and non-tax revenues respectively in the 36 participating countries from 2013 to 2022. Chapter 3 is a special feature on facilitation and trust as drivers of voluntary tax compliance in selected African tax administrations based on a study by ATAF. Chapter 4 explores the level of tax revenues by main tax category and how the respective tax structures of the 36 countries have evolved since 1990. Chapters 5 and 6 provide detailed information on tax and non-tax revenues on a country-by-country basis as well as a comparison of the non-tax revenue mix over time in the 36 countries.