Sitting steady in the top 10 ranking for the last three studies, Canada remains in 8th place when it comes to its ease of paying taxes for businesses, finds a study by PwC and the World Bank Group. It reviews tax regimes in 189 economies around the world.

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“Within North America, Canada maintains the lowest average total tax rate ranking largely due to its efforts to establish a tax-competitive and business-friendly environment,” says Brad Sakich, Canadian tax policy leader, PwC. “Privately owned small businesses in Canada should take comfort — the ranking demonstrates that Canadian government agencies support and encourage the creation of more such businesses.”

The factors that make Canada one of the best include:

  1. Significant reduction in the corporate income tax rate on annual Canadian profits in excess of $500,000 since 2001.
  2. Reduced corporate income tax rate on the first $500,000 of annual Canadian profits made by privately owned corporations.
  3. Canada’s efforts to simplify electronic reporting, filing and payment, and the tax regulatory and compliance aspects of running a business (tax red-tape).

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Here’s how Canada ranks compared to other G8 nations.

Economy Overall

(rank)

 Tax Payments Time to

Comply

(hrs)

 Total Tax

Rate

(TTR)
Canada 8 8 131 24.3%
United Kingdom 14 8 110 34.0%
France 52 7 132 64.7%
United States 64 11 175 46.3%
Germany 89 9 218 49.4%

The report indicates that continuing simplification of tax red-tape in Canada remains important, but with the current economic climate, the main priority for businesses today should be tax rate stability.

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Around the world

Some global key findings include:

  • among the regions, Europe and Central Asia made the biggest improvements in the ease of paying taxes over the past five years;
  • the global average for the time to comply has fallen every year since 2005. Time to comply is lowest in the United Arab Emirates where it takes 12 hours to deal with taxes that apply;
  • at 52.9%, Africa has the highest average TTR of any region; and
  • with a fall of 28 payments spread across all three types of tax (profit, labour, other) China has had the largest drop in the Asia Pacific region over the nine years of the study.