Treasury Income in Various Countries

Day 1,879, 23:21 • Published in USA Greece • by Jack Lantos




"In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes."
- Benjamin Franklin (1706-90)


This report compares the exact tax income of most of the major countries and a few of the smaller countries. This is useful information which is not provided by the game itself, yet it reveals a huge disparity between 'big' and 'small' countries, as well as some differences between economic "left" and "right" taxation systems (sort of).


Click for full size

How the exact treasury income was calculate😛

- The exact amount of currency moving into the state treasury was found by watching the country treasury balance over time, correcting for transfers (MPP costs, transfers to banks).
- Treasuries had to be observed for two days, to even out the activity levels at different times within each day (eg. increased activity just after day-change).
- The rate of income over time is found by linear regression and extrapolated out to 30 days. In the graphs below, the dashed grey lines indicate 90% probability intervals.


Also available to view: income graphs from other countries.

Taxpayer Stress Levels

By dividing total tax income with the number of active citizens we can estimate the tax stress on each citizen. However, there is a caveat: total tax income includes taxes from foreign trade. In particular, eChina seems to be a popular trading centre (foreigners buy from that market in game, encouraged by stable bonuses and minimum VAT) and does not really have high tax rates - but there is a high ratio of tax income to the number of citizens as a result.

Incidentally, another interesting thing about eChina is that it continues to fiercely defend full resources despite the fact that the game was fully blocked/censored in RL China 6 months ago.

Post-Surplus Apathy

All the 'major' countries at the top of this list have already accumulated enormous treasury surpluses, so some of them have set lower taxation levels with no bad effects. This presumably brings people back from the shadow economy, and allows them more net income for long-term investment in companies and strength.

The big countries in this game cannot go broke when magic resource bonuses double all production irrespective of population burden. In a more reasonable eWorld, bonuses might be impaired by high population burden as you would expect with valuable (i.e. limited) resources, although something tells me popular opinion would be biased against that, as most players were already drawn into 'big' countries.

eUSA

In eUSA, the extra income isn't needed but income tax is maximised to intentionally push players into communes, the long-standing idea being that dependence on state handouts and tax exempt MU communes rewards activity and helps to control 'engage' the population. 5% VAT keeps market prices competitive and probably contributes most of the income.

'Small' Countries

High VAT used to be popular in small countries, when they could exploit the market bot for enormous treasury incomes. This has changed since the bot was replaced, with most smaller countries now pressured to set minimum taxes to compensate for region-poor markets and to attract more players or at least retain existing players. Unfortunately as a result, the severely limited income potential of small countries appears to make the game pretty much unplayable, with some barely managing a budget of 3 MPPs before running into negatives.

The game designers understandably want there to be a strong motivation to capture regions and make more citizen accounts, but perhaps it's time to re-think the game objectives, and provide a more realistic option if the many separate minorities are to grow instead of continually decline and be bullied/depressed. It's sometimes amusing to suggest ideas, e.g. sharing of resources through free trade agreements or protector-protectorate status, or a population burden factor on the resource bonuses. Again however, trends suggest game changes only typically happen if gold-buyers gain an advantage.

"Active" citizens

The data for the number of citizens in each country is NOT using the number of citizens shown in game (which include dead accounts for marketing purposes). Only citizens who were active enough to click the fight button once within a 24-hr period were considered to be "active" in these analyses (citizen data from egov4you).

There is a linear correlation of citizens versus tax income as you would expect:



Based on that, a formula very roughly predicting tax income for any country not listed on the table is:

The daily tax of any country = the number of active citizens x 12

Monthly tax = the number of active citizens x 360

...where "active citizens" is the number of "Fighters" recorded in egov4you.

This will probably change in future due to decreasing gold exchange rates, market prices, and wages.

Conclusion

This independent report puts a number on how much tax countries are collecting and shows you how.

The enormous disparity between 'big' and 'small' countries continues to erode diversity and push players out of the game.