While hopefully our Governments make tax policy decisions with sharper tools than this, the report does highlight that a 12.5% rate of Corporation Tax is closer to the norm than ever before.

The Commission places great emphasis on a concept known as “implicit rate” which is a statistical attempt to take all factors into account when assessing the tax burden on labour (income taxes and various forms of national insurances), consumption (VAT, excises etc) and capital. Given the variations in EU Member State tax regimes, this is a rather forlorn exercise. To be fair to them, the Commission stresses that the averages may conceal “important variations” and should be “interpreted with caution”. That, and the fact that the statistics are based on 2008 figures, makes their relevance in July 2010 questionable.

Of more interest are the headline rates – Ireland's top rate of income tax is cited as being 41% in 2008, a statement which manages to be correct but not true. Our 12.5% rate of Corporation Tax is still one of the lowest on the list, but no longer stands out as the glorious exception that it used to be.

Of more interest are the statistics showing tax take as a percentage of GDP. These perhaps are a better reflection of the impact of taxation on national economies. Overall, EU taxation represents almost 40% of European GDP. It's no wonder really that tax is such a determining factor for US multinationals seeking to invest in Europe. In the US, the generally accepted wisdom of fiscal economics is encapsulated in Hauser's law. This is the notion that US Federal Taxes cannot account for more than 20% of US GDP. (It is this notion, incidentally, that is under challenge in the current debates on tax policy within the US.)

Drilling down further, we find that the Irish CT take in 2008 amounted to 2.9% of GDP. Yet the corresponding figure for Germany, with its 30% rate and enormous corporate sector, was only 1.1%. We also raise four times as much of our total taxes from Corporation Tax than Germany does. Similar comparisons can be drawn with other EU Member States. It raises the question as to how competitive our 12.5% rate really is now, and if the effective tax rate of other countries is in actual fact lower than 12.5%, despite their much higher headline rates.