Effective Tax Rate Measures

Structure of tax systems of particular countries across the world features with great complexity and largely differ from one country to another. Statutory tax rates are not a good measure of the tax burden imposed by the tax nor are they a good tool for comparing of different tax systems or analysing the effects of changes in tax laws. To gather all these information we need to construct synthetic indicators as effective tax rates that are the main subject of this work. The effective tax rates can be calculated using several different methods. The first part of this work describes and summarizes these methods of computation of effective tax rates and points its strengths and weaknesses. The second part of the work is then bases on authors own effective tax rate’s computations and compares effective tax rates in the Czech Republic with those in Europe. The aim is to find out whether the final tax burden in the Czech Republic is higher or lower than in EU-15 countries. Moreover the effective tax rates are compared to the statutory ones and the features of Czech tax system are described.