Financing the State: Government Tax Revenue from 1800 to 2012, 31 countries

This dataset presents information on historical central government revenues for 31 countries in Europe and the Americas for the period from 1800 (or independence) to 2012. The countries included are: Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Denmark, Ecuador, Finland, France, Germany (West Germany between 1949 and 1990), Ireland, Italy, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, Norway, Paraguay, Peru, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, the United States, Uruguay, and Venezuela. In other words, the dataset includes all South American, North American, and Western European countries with a population of more than one million, plus Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and Mexico. The dataset contains information on the public finances of central governments. To make such information comparable cross-nationally the researchers chose to normalize nominal revenue figures in two ways: (i) as a share of the total budget, and (ii) as a share of total gross domestic product. The total tax revenue of the central state is disaggregated guided by the Government Finance Statistics Manual 2001 of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) which provides a classification of types of revenue, and describes in detail the contents of each classification category. Given the paucity of detailed historical data and the needs of our project, researchers combined some subcategories. First, they were interested in total tax revenue, as well as the shares of total revenue coming from direct and indirect taxes. Further, they measured two sub-categories of direct taxation, namely taxes on property and income. For indirect taxes, they separated excises, consumption, and customs.