SCOPE
Brazil's tax take: 15%, 34% or 39% of GDP?
Why this gap?
Brazil's largest tax, the state-level ICMS, is invisible to the World Bank's central-government measure (15.4%), while the OECD counts taxes and social contributions at every level of government (33.7%) and the IMF adds non-tax revenue on top (39.5%). The spread is a portrait of Brazilian federalism: which layers of the state you count changes the answer by 24 points of GDP.