Measuring Tax Effort (A Case Study of the Middle- Income Countries)

Taxes have been the most significant income sources of governments from a long time ago and one of the main concerns of governors and policymakers is optimal collecting taxes of whole existing capacities.The aim of this paper is to estimate tax capacity and to calculate tax effort among middle- income countries. Panel data method, data from 1995-2009 and Stata software have been used to estimate model coefficients and then tax effort has been measured by using these coefficients. The results show that Iran obtains the least amount of tax effort indicator among others.