Journal de l'économie mondiale

Are Taxes Converging in Europe? Trends and Some Insights into the Effect of Economic Crisis

Abstract

Francisco J. Delgado

In this note we empirically revise the task of tax convergence in the European Union, paying attention to the possible effects derived from the deep economic crisis. For this purpose, beta and sigma convergence are estimated for the period 1965-2010 from OECD data with the main subdivisions generally used in the tax area. The results reported suggest the existence of overall convergence of the tax structure and the tax burden in the period 1965- 2010, but with clear nonlinearities, as the major advances took place up until the end of the 1980s.