Taxes per capita are the annual total of all collected taxes divided by the number of inhabitants. In general, taxes per capita have been increasing in Africa throughout the last two decades although the increase has been modest in low income countries. Taxes per capita provide an intuitive measure of the amount of tax revenue available on average to a government for each inhabitant. It is the amount of tax money available for the government to spend on everything ranging from building roads to providing public education on average for each inhabitant. Figure 6 plots the evolution of taxes per capita (same income groups as in Figure 5).

There are large differences across African countries in per capita levels of tax revenue. In countries like Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia and Guinea-Bissau, annual per capita taxes are as low as USD 11 per inhabitant. It is difficult to envision any consequential public service delivery with such a small per capita annual public budget. At the other end of the spectrum, in countries like the Seychelles, Libya and Equatorial Guinea, taxes reach an annual USD 3 600 per inhabitant. In 2008, Equatorial Guinea collected as much as USD 4 865 per inhabitant, primarily as a result of oil-related tax revenue.

There is more to taxes than their overall level in a country. To be able to assess a country’s tax system, it is important to also look at the relative composition of taxes, i.e. its tax mix.