Free markets and limited government are a tried-and-true recipe for growth and prosperity.
Indeed, it’s the only way for a poor nation to become a rich nation. 
Those are the policies that helpd North America and Western Europe become rich in the 1800s and it’s how East Asia became rich in the second half of the 1900s.
By contrast, there’s no poor country that has implemented statist policies and then become rich (which is why none of my left-wing friends have ever come up with a good answer to my two-question challenge).
But that doesn’t stop some international bureaucracies from pushing bad policies on poor nations.
I wrote last year about the International Monetary Fund’s pernicious efforts to impose higher tax burdens in Africa.
Now the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development is seeking to perpetuate poverty in the world’s poorest continent. The Paris-based bureaucracy actually is arguing that “urgent action” is need to impose higher taxes.
The average tax-to-GDP ratio for the 26 countries participating in the new edition of Revenue Statistics in Africa was…17.2% for the third consecutive year in 2017. …underlining the need for urgent action to enhance domestic revenue mobilisation in Africa.
…Overall, the tax structure across participating countries has evolved over the past decade, with VAT and personal income tax (PIT) accounting for a higher proportion of revenue generation in 2017 relative to 2008, on average. However, PIT (15.4% of total tax revenues) and social security contributions (8.1% of total tax revenues) remain low in Africa. Reforms to broaden the personal tax base…and expand social insurance coverage can assist in domestic resource mobilisation efforts while contributing to inclusive growth. …Property taxes are shown to be much lower in Africa than in LAC and in the OECD but have the potential to play a key role.
Before explaining why the OECD’s analysis is wrong, here are a couple of charts for those who want some country-specific details.
Here’s a look at the aggregate tax burdens in various nations.
I’m not surprised that South Africa’snumbers are so bad.
And here’s a look at how tax burdens have changed over the past 10 years.
Kudos to Botswana.
The big question to consider, of course, is why the OECD is pushing for higher taxes in poor nations.
The real reason is that the OECD represents the interest of governments and politicians instinctively want more revenue.
The official reason, though, is that the bureaucrats want people to believe – notwithstanding reams of evidence – that higher taxes are good for prosperity. And it’s not just the OECD pushing this bizarre theory. It’s now routine for international bureaucracies to push this upside-down analysis, based on the anti-empirical notion that economies will prosper if governments can finance more spending.
P.S. Africa’s big economic challenge is not bad fiscal policy. If you peruse the data from Economic Freedom of the World, the continent has huge problems with excessive regulation and poor quality of governance. What’s tragic, though, is that the OECD doesn’t push for good reforms in those area. Instead, it wants to make fiscal policy worse.
P.P.S. To be fair, the OECD doesn’t discriminate. The bureaucrats also advocate higher taxes in other poor regions, such as Latin America and Asia.
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Image credit: wjgomes | Pixabay License.
