Taxation rates and progressive vs regressive tax structures in the medieval world

External question — Economics Stack Exchange Author: Kevin Kostlan Original post: https://economics.stackexchange.com/questions/61065 License: CC BY-SA 4.0 — https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ Adaptation: HTML converted to plain text; contact email addresses removed. The medieval world encompasses a wide-range of taxation systems. Ultimately, be it money or handing over a portion of your crops, few peasants escaped taxation. In many places around the world we had some form of serfdom. There were mandatory tithing in some European systems, as well as a wide range of feudal systems where the lord took a cut of the crops. There was also a similarly wide range of corvee and monetized tax systems in China . This book covers Indian feudal economies. Africa had a huge range of geography, climate, culture, and systems as well; this beginner-friendly textbook chapter is a starting point. The Aztecs also needed taxes to pay for their infrastructure and other government programs. It's hard to generalize over such a large amount of places and times, but do we see any trends ? State vs Landlord Generally we want to differentiate "paying rent to a non-state landlord" with "paying taxes to the state". The "state" can be defined as who can get away with being violent which has always been a messy affair. In the modern US both the 50 states and the federal government can arrest people and both levy taxes so together they make up most of the control over violence. In some places and times in medieval Europe the Church had a lot of power to enforce laws as well as did lords in fiefdoms, etc. Loopholes and Bribery Peasants of course don't like paying taxes so they would bribe, under-report harvests, hide crops, etc as part of a laundry list of tips and tricks to reduce the tax burden. Quantifying rate and whether it's progressive Farmers (~80% of the population was a typical value) as well as other tradespeople (blacksmiths, carpenters, etc) and white-collar workers (bean counters, etc) commonly worked in systems where they hybridized barter and money. To quantify the median tax rate you look at the total market value of the goods produced vs the total market value of goods or money taken by what you consider the "state". Regardless of whether any money was actually exchanged. To quantify whether taxes are progressive vs regressive you could look at 25%tile vs 75%tile income tax rates or other metrics. But the choice of which percentiles is arbitrary. The suits index looks at all percentiles at once. You line up people's income on the x-axis from poor to rich. Each "slot" represents one dollar; the poor are crowded to the left and the rich enjoy their spacious mansions on the right. They y-axis is the cumulative tax dollars paid. You then look at the area between the curve and the "proportional taxation" diagonal line. An index of 1 means that only the richest person pays taxes, a proportional tax has an index of 0, a "poll tax" (constant dollars regardless of income) is regressive an index equal to the negative of the Gini index (a sales tax on food approximates this), and an index of -1 means only the poorest person pays taxes. These extreme values are unrealistic, of course, and values are much closer to zero. What were the typical ranges of tax rates and Suits indies in the medieval world comparing across it's various economic systems?

External answer — Economics Stack Exchange Author: 1muflon1 Original post: https://economics.stackexchange.com/a/61066 License: CC BY-SA 4.0 — https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ Adaptation: HTML converted to plain text; contact email addresses removed. What were the typical ranges of tax rates and Suits indies in the medieval world comparing across it's various economic systems? I will first address the second part about Suit's indices. This is simply impossible to answer with the extremely limited historical data. We do not have data to even calculate Suit's index for many developing countries today, in the 21st century. As explained in the article linked by your question you need granular household/individual/group level pre- and post-tax incomes. Although every economic historian for sure wishes otherwise, such data simply does not exist. We only have very rough estimates of national incomes and average household incomes from medieval times (eg see the Maddison project). I would be extremely surprised if anyone even in the near future would be able to calculate Suit's index for some medieval country or region. Nonetheless, we can say that the taxes were mostly regressive since many countries relied primarily on commodity taxes and custom duties. Also we are talking about an extremely broad time span and various locations, but it wasn't uncommon for the Church to be exempt from taxes and high nobility also often went untaxed, although they had a duty to provide military service which can be considered a form of commodity tax, but that complicates any discussion about progressivity of the tax system ( Menjot, D., Pijuan, P. V., & Caesar, M. 2022 ). For example, tax on salt was very important in France. Such commodity taxes affect poor people more, because for a poor person the cost of salt is a bigger share of their budget than for a rich person. We have some patchwork information about various tax rates. However, going over every country and decade would be too cumbersome for an SE answer. So let's just talk in broad generalizations. In Europe the church tithe itself was about 10% of output ( Dodds 2007 ), then on top of that you would have various localized taxes that amounted to roughly another 1/10th or possibly even 1/5th of output although we do not have exact percentages (Hilton 1975, Dyer 1989). On top of that there were also all the indirect taxes. I recon that it is plausible that depending on what period and place we talk about the average tax rate on income across all taxes was somewhere in ballpark of 20-50%. However, if you expected some sort of table/map with various tax rates per country you will be disappointed. Such data don't exist either.