In the first year of the coronavirus pandemic, Mexico was the second country in Latin America and the Caribbean with the highest increase in tax collection, since it went from 16.3% in 2019 to 17.9% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 2020 , according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
In the report “Tax Statistics in Latin America and the Caribbean 2022”, the OECD recognized the work of the Tax Administration Service (SAT) because “it adopted several measures that included tax inspections focused on evasion and avoidance, which contributed to an increase of 1.6 percentage points (pp) in tax collection.”
Mexico was one of the few countries worldwide with an annual increase in tax revenue of 2020. The country’s tax collection increased, in nominal terms, 1.3% of GDP and 0.8% in real terms in that year.
The SAT collected 3.3 billion pesos in tax revenue in 2020, this represented a nominal increase of 136,292 million pesos, although it fell below what was programmed in the Federal Income Law of that year for 166,879 million pesos.
The OECD detailed that only in Argentina, Mexico, Nicaragua and Uruguay was nominal tax revenue increased between 2019 and 2020 and, in three of them, nominal GDP also increased.
“Mexico is the only country whose tax coefficient increased because nominal tax revenues increased while the GDP nominal was reduced”, explained the OECD.
Despite the increase in tax collection as a percentage of GDP, the country was below the average of Latin America and the Caribbeanof 21.9% and of the OECD, of 33.5 percent.
In addition, Mexico is the sixth economy that collects the least in the region. It is below Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, Paraguay, Panama, Peru, exhibits the document prepared by the international organization.
The increase in tax collection Mexico It was only behind Antigua and Barbuda because the Caribbean country had an increase of 1.7 percentage points in 2020.
In the opposite case, the largest contractions in the region during this period were observed in Cuba (4.6 percentage points), Trinidad and Tobago (3.3 percentage points) and Belize (3.0 percentage points).
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