We collect and categorize all 105 DPO/PFR tax-policy recommendations issued by the World Bank in East Asia and the Pacific between FY2015 and FY2025. We classify them by tax instrument, country, source (DPO vs PFR/PER), and direction, then look for patterns.
Headline: 67% of advice has targeted consumption
and corporate taxes. Property tax accounts for just 4%. Direct
personal taxation (PIT + capital income) is 23%. Country variation
is large — Indonesia receives 17 recommendations over the decade,
while several Pacific economies receive one or two.
Composition of the portfolio
Figure 1 — WB tax recommendations by category, FY2015–FY2025 (105 entries).
Country breakdown by PFR/PER and DPO recommendations. Indonesia,
Vietnam, Philippines, and Mongolia absorb most of the engagement.
Country × tax category heatmap — where the advisory effort has
been concentrated.
How EAP compares with other WB regions
EAP sits in the middle of the six WB regions on tax DPF prior actions. Whatever explains the flatness of EAP tax/GDP since 2010, it is unlikely to be the quantity of WB tax advisory engagement.
Total tax DPF prior actions across WB regions, FY2004–FY2024.
EAP records 141 — third of six.
Tax DPF prior actions per country with active DPF engagement.
EAP at 5.6 per active country — middle of the pack.
Current engagement, FY2025
11 EAP countries with active engagements as of FY2025; activity
count per country across the three pillars.
Findings
- WB tax advise was active across EAP, with 10 countries receiving DPF advice and 17 receiving PFR/PER advice.
- Advice has focused on consumption and corporate taxes, with less attention to direct personal taxation.
- Significant variation in the number of recommendations across countries; some receive many, others none despite similar tax patterns.
- We don't seem to take a regional view on issues; country advice prevails.
Reflection: To what extent do recommendations reflect WB advice capacity, country comfort and political economy, compared to the structural conditions and tax needs of EAP economies?
Source files
All figures
15 PNG files
Every figure produced by Section 1, including auxiliary breakdowns.
Tables
27 CSV files
Counts, cross-tabs, and category breakdowns underlying the figures.
Code
8 R scripts
Load → clean → analyse → tables → figures + engagement map + regional comparator.
Underlying dataset
Master dataset
125 hand-coded recommendations, the canonical record.