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Abstract

. We cannot think that the tax revenues, which constitute the largest portion of public revenues, can be unlimitedly collected. Hence, it has been clearly seen that the efforts to collect the taxes unlimitedly have caused social problems and crises. The tax capacity, which is one of the ratios used for determining the taxable portion of income level of a country, is one of the generally accepted ratios. This limit varies depending on the countries and time period. In our study, by determining the methods that are used for calculating the tax capacity in our literature review, we aimed to calculate the tax burden and Turkey’s tax capacity level between the years 1984 and 2012. As the dependent variables in our study, Tax Revenues / GDP was used and, as independent variables, Value Added of Agriculture (% of GDP), income per capita, population growth ratio, foreign trade percentage, annual GDP growth rates (%), corruption index, and the Bureaucracy Efficiency Index, annual GDP growth rate (%) data were used, and it was concluded that foreign trade influenced the tax capacity positively, while the agricultural value added had negative effect. In our study, even though a generally balanced course is seen between actual tax burden and tax capacity from 1984 to 2012, it can be easily seen that the tax collection was generally lower than the tax capacity.