It is almost an article of faith in some quarters that the surest route to faster economic growth lies on a path strewn with lower taxes. Sometimes, however, articles of faith don't quite match the evidence supplied by the real world. Andrew Jackson, director of research at the Canadian Council on Social Development, thinks this is one of those times. He has pulled together some impressive support -- much of it from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development -- for his view. Mr. Jackson's thoughts on this issue warrant a wider audience simply because they go to the heart of Canada's debate over what to do with growing government surpluses. Should they be converted into tax cuts or new spending or used to pay down debt?

The newly elected Liberals have promised some of all three, but several provinces have leaned heavily in the direction of tax cuts, with plans to go even further. Ontario Premier Mike Harris and Alberta Premier Ralph Klein regularly cite low tax rates as a key reason for their provinces' strong economies. This is not just political posturing. There is plenty of support in economic theory for this view and plenty of economists who will defend it.

The companion to this notion is that we have to sacrifice the goal of income equality if we want a high-performance economy. Governments with less tax revenue cannot afford generous social programs, so less money is transferred from the well-off to the poor. "The idea that society faces a fundamental tradeoff . . . between social justice and economic growth is a staple of both economics textbooks and contemporary political debate," Mr. Jackson says in his study, which is available at www.ccsd.ca/pubs/2000/equity The United States is usually portrayed at one end of the spectrum -- fast growth combined with extreme inequality in the distribution of income -- while European countries find themselves at the other end, with relatively equal incomes, but slow growth. What happens when you take this idea out for a road test? Some data from the OECD suggests that in the 1990s, it crashed. The OECD compared growth rates and tax burdens in 22 countries. The growth measure was the annual increase in real gross domestic product per person between 1990 and 1998; taxes were measured as a percentage of GDP in 1994.

If you plot these on a graph where growth rates run up the vertical axis and the tax burden across the horizontal axis, you'd expect to find a pattern. High-growth low-tax countries would be in the top left corner and low-growth high-tax countries in the bottom right. But there is no pattern. Countries with similar growth rates had wildly different tax burdens; countries with similar tax burdens had wildly different growth rates. Among the G7 countries alone, Japan, Canada, Germany, Italy and France all saw per capita growth of about 1 per cent annually over that period. But their tax burdens ranged from Japan's 28 per cent of GDP up to France's 44 per cent, with Canada near the lower end at 35 per cent. The United States, with a tax load of 28 per cent, recorded growth of 1.7 per cent a year, but so did Britain, where the tax burden was closer to Canada's 35 per cent. Ireland's taxes were slightly higher, at 36 per cent, but its growth rate was a staggering 5.5 per cent a year, the best of any of the 22 countries in the study.

The highest tax country was Denmark, at 50 per cent, but its GDP per person grew by 2.3 per cent annually, better than the United States' rate. When you repeat the exercise comparing economic growth and income equality, the result is the same -- no pattern. Denmark's incomes, for example, were more evenly distributed than most countries, yet its growth rate was among the highest. If nothing else, Mr. Jackson has demonstrated that there are no simple recipes for strong economic growth. But then, in the real world, there rarely are, despite what politicians would have us believe.