Revenue Statistics in Africa is a joint publication by the OECD Centre for Tax Policy and Administration, the OECD Development Centre, the African Tax Administration Forum and the African Union Commission, with the technical support of the African Development Bank, the World Customs Organisation and the Centre de rencontres et d’études des dirigeants des administrations fiscales. It presents detailed, internationally comparable data on both tax and non-tax revenues for eight African countries. Its approach is based on the well-established methodology of the OECD Revenue Statistics database, which has become an essential reference source for OECD member countries and many more. Comparisons are also made with the average for OECD economies and for the economies featured in Revenue Statistics in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Revenue Statistics in Africa is a significant step towards enhancing the comparability, quality and accessibility of public revenue data on the continent. Co-operation and transparency guided the compilation of this first edition. African and international organisations, working in partnership, invited African governments to share their statistics and collaborated closely with officials from tax administrations and statistics offices. A time-tested methodology and process reclassified the figures, leading to a new set of detailed, country-specific data for wide public dissemination.

This first edition of Revenue Statistics in Africa presents internationally comparable revenue data for eight African countries. These countries account for almost a quarter of Africa’s total GDP. The administrations of Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Mauritius, Morocco, Rwanda, Senegal, South Africa, and Tunisia contributed to the project and worked closely with the OECD, the African Tax Administration Forum and the African Union Commission, with the technical support of the African Development Bank, the World Customs Organisation and the Centre de rencontres et d’études des dirigeants des administrations fiscales.

The purpose of this annual Revenue Statistics in Africa (RSIA) publication is to present internationally comparative statistics on both tax and non-tax revenues for eight African countries (Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Mauritius, Morocco, Rwanda, Senegal, South Africa, and Tunisia). It includes internationally comparable data for all levels of government on tax and non-tax revenues as percentage of GDP as well as the structures of these revenues. It also describes some of the factors behind their evolution in the years 1990- 2014.

For Africa, as for the rest of the world, taxes are an instrument of social justice and economic prosperity. The 2008 global economic and financial crisis gave new momentum to initiatives and calls for taxation to be more effective, more investmentattractive, more transparent, more progressive, simpler and more stable in order to return to more robust and fairer growth. The stakes are all the greater in the countries of Africa. On one hand, from a budgetary point of view, in a context of strong demographic growth, governments and local authorities are struggling to provide quality public and social services to their citizens. The financing needs for infrastructure that will attract investors and unlock the productive potential of the continent’s economies are colossal. On the other hand, from the institutional point of view, taxation is a fundamental instrument to build and consolidate a modern state. By promoting fair circulation of wealth in a society, it constitutes a democratic lever for good governance and an engine for broader reforms.