Introduction
Tax revenues totalled 255.463 billion euros, which represented an increase of 14.4% compared to the figure recorded in 2021.
The growth was close to that experienced by tax collection in 2021 (15.1%), but while in that year the comparison was made against a year fully affected by the pandemic, in 2022 it is made against a year in which, without having fully recovered normality, the income of 2019, the year before the COVID crisis, had already been exceeded by 5%.
The increase in tax bases, and in particular in consumer spending, labour income (wages and pensions) and business profits, was the main reason for the growth in revenue. To this must be added the contribution from the revenue from the annual declarations corresponding to the 2021 financial year. The increase also occurred in a year in which the impact of regulatory and management measures (especially those aimed at slowing the rise in electricity prices) was significant: the cost was 7.2 billion. The pace of refunds was also accelerated towards the end of the year. These two elements subtracted around 3.2 points from revenue growth.
Part of the increase in revenue was due to price increases that began to be observed intensely from the second half of 2021 and continued throughout 2022. But that price increase was not the main reason for the revenue growth. It is estimated that less than 5 points of this increase was due to higher inflation than in previous years, despite the fact that the CPI (the usual reference, although not necessarily the most appropriate when it comes to tax collection) grew, on average for the year, by 8.4%. In this regard, it should be noted that the CPI only directly affects a portion of VAT revenues, which, after adjusting for measures and the advance of refunds, grew more than twice as fast as prices. Moreover, the rise in electricity prices (which accounted for around one point of the CPI increase) was not passed on to revenues due to the rate cut (to 10% in the first half and to 5% in the second). On the other hand, in the case of rent-related income, price increases tend to manifest themselves with a delay; Thus, wage and pension increases in 2022 reflected price increases from the previous year more than those of that year. In other figures where the tax is levied on physical consumption, such as the Tax on Hydrocarbons, the effect of high prices was felt in the opposite direction, reducing revenue.
Analysing the details of the four major taxes, income from personal income tax grew by 15.8%, meaning that almost half of the growth in total income came from this figure. Behind this increase is the rise in labour income and its effective rate, the good results of the 2021 annual declaration submitted at the end of June 2022 and the positive evolution of personal business profits. Corporate tax revenues grew by 20.8% as a result of the expansive performance of profits in both 2022 and 2021. The former were reflected in a sharp increase in instalment payments (17.7%) and the latter in the considerable growth (41.7%) of income from the annual declaration, mostly from the 2021 declaration filed from July 2022. VAT revenues grew by 13.9%. The growth would be 16% if the revenue lost due to the measures on energy consumption is added and 19.4% if the negative impact on revenue of the speeding up of refunds that occurred in the last part of the year is also corrected. The rates are much higher than the increase in prices over the same period, which gives an idea of the strong recovery in consumption. Excise taxes grew by 2.5% overall. It should be remembered that these taxes were, among the major figures, the only ones that in 2021 failed to recover the level of 2019. They did not achieve this in 2022 either, although if the calculation is made without taking into account the Electricity Tax, affected by the measures to reduce the price of electricity, then the income is slightly higher than in 2019. The origin of such a poor result was the weak performance of the Hydrocarbon Tax.