Is Argentina a country with high fiscal pressure?

Abstract

Although Argentina's tax burden has increased in relation to GDP in recent decades, ranking only behind Brazil among Latin American countries, the argument of its high tax burden is sometimes maximized, indicating that we are one of the countries with the highest tax burden in the world.
There are at least two ways of calculating the tax burden: the legal tax burden (PTL) and the effective tax burden (PTE). The first arises from the quotient between tax collection and GDP and the second is the result of the theoretical collection and its relation to GDP, i.e. without evasion. The problem with using the PTE is that it underestimates the tax pressure on formal taxpayers since the PTE is affected by evasion levels.
The work carried out is based on a practical case taken from reality. For this purpose, the income of a family chosen for this study was considered and the incidence of three types of taxes (taxes, rates and contributions) on income, wealth and consumption was calculated.
It is worth clarifying that the so-called “inflationary tax” was not taken into account for the purposes of the calculation, even though we know that it directly affects families and companies in the country.  The results found show the importance of estimating the PTL for a particular case. This result cannot be extrapolated to the rest of the Argentinean families unless they comply with most of the assumptions used in the calculations.