asked the Chancellor of the Exchequer if, in the manner of the reply given to the hon. Member for Norfolk, North Official Report, 13 February 1984, column 65, he will compare in local currencies and in pound sterling equivalent (a) gross domestic product per person, (b) average income tax paid per person, (c) average value added tax paid per person and (d) average per capita annual income in each of the United Kingdom, Germany and France during the years 1981, 1982, 1983 and 1984.

The information available is given in the following table. For corresponding data for 1982 on items (b) and (c) I refer my hon. Friend to the answer given to him on 11 February at column 52; no later data are available. Exchange rates do not necessarily provide a satisfactory basis for converting other national currencies into pound sterling in the context of GDP and a more realistic assessment of relative levels of GDP in terms of their domestic purchasing power can be made through the use of purchasing power parities. Estimates on both bases are given in the table.

asked the Chancellor of the Exchequer what information he has as to (a) the comparative gross domestic product and (b) the percentage of gross domestic product accounted for by income taxes and value-added tax, respectively, for each member state of the European Economic Community, for each year since 1981 inclusive; and if he will also provide for each country the total of individual salaries or incomes as a percentage of that country's gross domestic product.

Comparisons of gross domestic product per head between EC member states for the years 1981–83 are given in "OECD National Accounts 1960–1983" (volume 1, page 125). A copy of the publication is available in the House of Commons Library. For information on the percentage of gross domestic product accounted for by income taxes and value added tax in the period 1981–1983, and provisional estimates of comparative gross domestic product in 1984, I refer my hon. Friend to the answer given to him on 11 February at column 54.The following table gives percentages of gross domestic product accounted for by personal income in 1981 and 1982 for Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. Corresponding figures for later years (apart from the United Kingdom) and for the other EC member states are not available. These figures should be used with caution since they are not comparable partly for the reasons indicated by the footnotes to the table and partly because of variations between countries in the relative importance of the corporate sector and the self-employed.