Abstract:

The article is devoted to the issues of determining the severity of taxation in a state. It provides the analysis of two methods: calculation of the tax burden in the classical version and calculation of the index of fiscal freedom. A hypothesis is suggested on the inverse relationship of the sought-for indicators. The study was conducted on the example of 11 countries, which include the states with the highest and lowest tax burden based on the data for 2017 and Russia. The data on the tax burden and the index of fiscal freedom for the period from 2011 to 2017 are analyzed. Conclusions have been made about the characteristic tax trends in these countries. Then, by the value of the index of fiscal freedom, the countries are divided into the following groups: free, mostly free, moderately free, repressed. The examples of Russia, Malaysia, Uganda, Guatemala, Finland and Denmark, representing specific groups of countries, are used to make a graphic representation of the relationship between the tax burden and the index of fiscal freedom. In general, it is an inverse relationship.