Presently the tax calculations in Taxing Wages are based on the average earnings of manual employees working full-time in the manufacturing sector (average production worker; APW). However, the number of people employed as manual workers in the manufacturing sector as a share of total employment has been decreasing steadily over time in most OECD countries. As a result of this it might be questioned whether average earnings of a manual production worker is still a sufficiently representative measure of average earnings of a “typical taxpayer”. This question was addressed in a special feature in the 1994 publication, The Tax/Benefit Position of Production Workers – Annual Report 1990-1993, and the results from that special feature indicated that the present definition did not provide the best basis for comparable results across countries...