Paying Taxes 2014 looks at tax regimesin 189 economies as part of the Doing Business series. Theperiod covered by the study, 2004 to 2012, has seen the endof a sustained period of economic growth, a severe recessionand a slow recovery. Governments continue to be under thepressure balance the need to attract investment and fostergrowth while generating tax revenues. This report finds thatgovernments continue to reform their tax systems despiteglobal economic uncertainty, with 32 economies having takensteps from June last year through May 2013 to make it easierand cost less for small and medium businesses to pay taxes.The report finds that the most common tax reform undertakenby 11 economies is the introduction or improvement ofelectronic filing, eliminating the need for 74 separate taxpayments and reducing compliance time by almost 200 hours intotal. On average around the world it now takes our casestudy company 268 hours to comply with its taxes, it makes26.7 payments and has an average total tax rate of 43.1percent. The range for each sub-indicator is very wide. Thenumber of payments ranges from 3 in Hong Kong SAR, China andSaudi Arabia to 71 in República Bolivariana de Venezuela.The time to comply is lowest in the United Arab Emirateswhere it takes 12 hours to deal with the taxes that apply,all of which are labor taxes. The highest number of hours isstill taken by our company in Brazil. It takes 2,600 hourswith more than half of this time being spent on consumptiontaxes. Until 2008, 7 of the 8 geographical regions coveredin the report had consistently recorded a fall in theiraverage total tax rate. This changed in 2009 when only 5regions recorded a fall. This fell to 3 in 2011 and in thelatest study only Africa and South America show a fall inthe total tax rate while all other regions show an increaseapart from Asia Pacific and EU and EFTA where rates of 36.6percent and 42.5 percent respectively have been maintained.Over the nine years of the study the total tax rateattributable to profit taxes have fallen faster than thatfor labor taxes so that labor taxes are now the largestelement of the total tax rate. While the average time tocomply has fallen by 55 hours over the 9 years of the study,the rate of decline has slowed dramatically in the mostrecent period, falling by only 1 hour between 2011 and 2012.Over the nine years of study, the greatest improvement ontime has been seen for labor taxes (23 hours). The number ofhours has fallen by 19 hours for consumption taxes and by 13hours for corporate income tax.
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