Our World
in Data
Oxford Martin School logoUniversity of Oxford logoGlobal Change Data Lab logo
Data

Tax revenue

About this data

Source
Piketty (2014) – processed by Our World in Data
Last updated
September 20, 2016
Date range
1868–2008
Unit
% national income

Related research and writing

A dark blue background with a lighter blue world map superimposed over it. Yellow text that says Taxation by Our World in Data

Taxation

Esteban Ortiz-Ospina and Max Roser

Sources and processing

This data is based on the following sources

Piketty – Capital in the 21st Century

Data on tax revenues include all taxes, fees, social contributions, and other payments that citizens mush pay under penalty of law.

Data on top marginal tax rates includes general income tax supplements, but excludes all other taxes and social contributions (e.g. NHS in the UK)

Retrieved on
September 20, 2016
Retrieved from
http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/en/capital21c2
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
Piketty, T. (2014). Capital in the 21st Century. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Data on tax revenues include all taxes, fees, social contributions, and other payments that citizens mush pay under penalty of law.

Data on top marginal tax rates includes general income tax supplements, but excludes all other taxes and social contributions (e.g. NHS in the UK)

Retrieved on
September 20, 2016
Retrieved from
http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/en/capital21c2
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
Piketty, T. (2014). Capital in the 21st Century. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

How we process data at Our World in Data

All data and visualizations on Our World in Data rely on data sourced from one or several original data providers. Preparing this original data involves several processing steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing country names and world region definitions, converting units, calculating derived indicators such as per capita measures, as well as adding or adapting metadata such as the name or the description given to an indicator.

At the link below you can find a detailed description of the structure of our data pipeline, including links to all the code used to prepare data across Our World in Data.

Read about our data pipeline

Reuse this work

  • All data produced by third-party providers and made available by Our World in Data are subject to the license terms from the original providers. Our work would not be possible without the data providers we rely on, so we ask you to always cite them appropriately (see below). This is crucial to allow data providers to continue doing their work, enhancing, maintaining and updating valuable data.
  • All data, visualizations, and code produced by Our World in Data are completely open access under the Creative Commons BY license. You have the permission to use, distribute, and reproduce these in any medium, provided the source and authors are credited.

Citations

How to cite this page

To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by Our World in Data, please use the following citation:

“Data Page: Tax revenue”. Our World in Data (2026). Data adapted from Piketty. Retrieved from https://auto-wildfires.owid.pages.dev:8789/20260511-092124/grapher/tax-revenue-national-income-longrun.html [online resource] (archived on May 11, 2026).

How to cite this data

In-line citationIf you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:

Piketty (2014) – processed by Our World in Data

Full citation

Piketty (2014) – processed by Our World in Data. “Tax revenue” [dataset]. Piketty, “Capital in the 21st Century” [original data]. Retrieved May 19, 2026 from https://auto-wildfires.owid.pages.dev:8789/20260511-092124/grapher/tax-revenue-national-income-longrun.html (archived on May 11, 2026).

Download

Quick download

Download the data shown in this chart as a ZIP file containing a CSV file, metadata in JSON format, and a README. The CSV file can be opened in Excel, Google Sheets, and other data analysis tools.

Download full data

Includes all entities and time points

Download displayed data

Includes only the entities and time points currently visible in the chart

Data API

Use these URLs to programmatically access this chart's data and configure your requests with the options below. Our documentation provides more information on how to use the API, and you can find a few code examples below.

Data URL (CSV format)
https://auto-wildfires.owid.pages.dev/grapher/tax-revenue-national-income-longrun.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false
Metadata URL (JSON format)
https://auto-wildfires.owid.pages.dev/grapher/tax-revenue-national-income-longrun.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false

Code examples

Examples of how to load this data into different data analysis tools.

Excel / Google Sheets
=IMPORTDATA("https://auto-wildfires.owid.pages.dev/grapher/tax-revenue-national-income-longrun.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")
Python with Pandas
import pandas as pd
import requests

# Fetch the data.
df = pd.read_csv("https://auto-wildfires.owid.pages.dev/grapher/tax-revenue-national-income-longrun.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", storage_options = {'User-Agent': 'Our World In Data data fetch/1.0'})

# Fetch the metadata
metadata = requests.get("https://auto-wildfires.owid.pages.dev/grapher/tax-revenue-national-income-longrun.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false").json()
R
library(jsonlite)

# Fetch the data
df <- read.csv("https://auto-wildfires.owid.pages.dev/grapher/tax-revenue-national-income-longrun.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")

# Fetch the metadata
metadata <- fromJSON("https://auto-wildfires.owid.pages.dev/grapher/tax-revenue-national-income-longrun.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")
Stata
import delimited "https://auto-wildfires.owid.pages.dev/grapher/tax-revenue-national-income-longrun.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", encoding("utf-8") clear