Treasury Income in Various Countries
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).
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How the exact treasury income was calculate
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- 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
'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.
Comments
Great report!
wow 1% income tax in eAustralia, the world should go to work there.
Very interesting info.
Voted. Nice job!
A game of enormous disparities...well, that about says it all.
Great info!
Shouted
V
Wow. That is one awesome article.
I approve
great report
v+s
I should so something about taxation in Romania 😮P.
Just kidding, I'm a proud liberal 😮)
Great insight.
Of course, very informative article! Good job!
Well done!
Voted.
Hello!
As someone who does this pretty much constantly, I'd just like to point out that a 1 day monitoring period is far too short to make monthly predictions. Stuff like wars, region changes and admin offers have a big effect on the day-to-day income of each country. A 7 day average gives you a better idea, but a 30 day trend is the only way to predict future income with any degree of accuracy.
@Iain, 60 day trend is also a way to predict the future, so you're wrong about 30 day trend being the only way ; )
Informative article, keep up the good work and increase the time span of your data. I believe api.erpk.org could have info and automation for gathering the daily data about taxes, markets, regions & so on.
Very good article
Aplause
Voted and subscribed
I don't know anything about economics, but I can appreciate that a lot of work went into this article!! Kudos for that. o7
Re: the Chinese, just like RL Thai's, many players gamble on not being caught & make use of proxies to play. One of my other, regular gaming account's email has had a whole lot of hacking attempts in the last month, all originating from the same IP in China.
So if you have a decent looking gaming account in any other games, monitor their associated email accounts, or you may end up losing everything in those games.
Great stuff. Thanks.
http://www.erepublik.com/en/article/day-1880-2192462/1/20
Hmm, I'm not so sure about all you're numbers, $20.18 in taxes per day per eUS citizen? That can't be right. If the current top market salary is $20.05 and the income tax is 25%, how can that be? Plus I work in a commune. If the rest is coming of off VAT taxes then I guess the economy is good because people are buying a lot of stuff.
So yeah, one day is bad, there must have been a buying splurge somewhere, becasue I I know I sure as hell didn't pay $20 in taxes that day, or any day recently at all really.
http://www.erepublik.com/pt/article/cyberbullying-in-ept-2192441/1/20
Voted and shouted
Hampton, he is correct. Wage income is a very small fraction of the total income of players. Players with lots of companies create/sell/buy weapons and pay VAT for each market trade.
Great work btw. I had done a similar analysis with a panel of 2 months and nearly all the countries, and the results were similar. Regression analysis identified Weapons VAT as the main driver of tax revenue per capita, as one might guess.
v+s, very good article!
Awesome report
@Kutluk
Then the econmy must be good if people are buying htat much stuff, excellent.
great work
@Iain, yes you're right, I tried this in the past and it illustrated the result of changing taxes, or when plato changed something. I think by measuring over 2 days it at least gives a snapshot of the present time. The 30-day prediction is within a certain range (based on the variation seen) and is on the assumption that conditions remain similar.
@Hostilian, thanks that API will help, we shall let the computers do the work
@Hampton yes it seems to be mostly w VAT, which set at 5% seems to be a good level for keeping the prices attractive. The companies don't make much profit but people already made plenty of them and they all overproduce
Great work but I do not know if those numbers are correct.
One day is definitely not enough, as taxes tend to be more closely connected to the severity of battles nowadays then to actual economic situation.
Also there is no generic formula that can be used as there is huge disparity between the economic output of different accounts. To put it more simply 80% of the production of Q6/Q7 tanks comes from 20% or even less of the accounts, which tend to be concentrated in a few places in the world with stable full bonuses.
The other problem is that prices are essentially fixed by the game mechanics, so profit is dependent on taxes and bonuses, with taxes having a bigger influence because salaries make up very small % of the expenses.
This means that in terms of economics bonuses are not that important but rather the tax levels. Bonuses actually have bigger influence on the war costs, as more weapons produced for the same amount of energy means more hits with Q7 weapons for the same cost.
So bonuses increase daily damage rather then income, however it is not needed for your country to have the bonuses as it is enough for the producers to be in a country that has them.
Nice work
Wish the eUSA taxes would be alittle lower
no Germany no vote ;_;
^ nächstes Mal
;P
jut jut : 3
excellent, Thx
life is hard on e Republic we need a proper economic policy because the job market is failing and we are runing out of cash so why cant we try to implement a proper policy that is all which help create the market on track