A new 2% tax on the 2,756 people in the world who have assets greater than 1,000 million dollars would allow raising 214,000 million, according to the European Tax Observatory (EU Tax Observatory), which proposes this tax to correct the low types to which they are subjected.
In a report published this Monday, this organization directed by the French economist Gabriel Zucman, and with which the Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz is directly linked, emphasizes that billionaires bear tax rates of between only 0% and 0.5 % of your assets.
One of the reasons to explain why their tax rate is clearly lower than that of other groups of the population is that in many cases they can resort to instruments such as personal companies (in the form of holding companies) to house assets, especially financial ones, that exempt them from tax. pay taxes on dividends.
The study’s authors also note that the wealth of this small group of billionaires has increased at an average annual rate of 7% since 1995, discounting the effect of inflation.
By region, of the 2,756 people with assets valued at more than 1,000 million dollars (that in total almost 13 billion in assets), 835 are North Americans, 499 Europeans, 838 from countries in East Asia, 260 from South and Southeast Asia. Asia, 105 South Americans, 133 from Russia and Central Asia, 75 from the Middle East and North Africa and 11 from Sub-Saharan Africa.
The proposed new 2% tax would generate $72.3 billion in North America, $60.3 billion in South and Southeast Asian countries, and $42.3 billion in Europe.
The European Tax Observatory is very disappointed with the minimum rate of 15% for corporate tax that is the result of the international agreement reached in 2021, within the framework of the negotiations led by the OECD.
In practice, it estimates that it is reporting less than 5% of corporate tax revenue on a global scale due to the various flaws with which it has been implemented, when 9% could have been expected if it had been applied with a effective rate of 15%.
His proposal is to implement a minimum rate of 25% for corporate tax and eliminate exemption devices that favor tax competition, so that some 250,000 million current dollars could be raised.
In the end, adding the product of the rate on billionaires and that of this upward correction of the tax rate on the profits of multinationals, we could obtain around half a trillion dollars annually, which is an amount equivalent to the additional money they need. developing countries to address the challenges of climate change.
