Paying Taxes 2009: About the study

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Paying Taxes provides a comparison of the world’s tax systems from the point of view of a case study company. The aim is to provide insights and data, which will assist the process of tax reform and to gain a more in-depth understanding of the results. It is also important to look beyond the rankings to the underlying data. As well as the individual rankings on the ease of paying taxes around the world. The Paying Taxes study highlights how businesses are affected not only by corporate income taxes, but also by many other taxes. In addition, it shows how the procedural burden of tax compliance impacts companies.

The Paying Taxes data, produced as part of the World Bank – IFC’s Doing Business study (www.doingbusiness.org/), measures the ease of paying taxes for small- to medium-sized domestic companies around the world. The Doing Business ‘paying taxes’ indicator is based on a case study company and assesses taxes from this company’s perspective using three indicators:

• The Total Tax Rate (the cost of all taxes borne by the company)
• The time taken to comply with the major taxes
• The number of tax payments for the major taxes

The data on all three sub-indicators, the rankings by economy for these sub-indicators and the overall rankings are included in Appendix 1 of Paying Taxes 2009: The global picture and are provided on this Web site. Further details on all the underlying data are available at: www.doingbusiness.org/exploretopics/payingtaxes.

The Paying Taxes study uses the methodology of the PricewaterhouseCoopers Total Tax Contribution framework, which is designed to help companies identify their true tax contribution, either in a particular country, or on a global basis.