This article attempts to estimate the magnitude of corporate tax avoidance and personal tax evasion through offshore tax havens. US corporations book 20 percent of their profits in tax havens, a ...tenfold increase since the 1980; their effective tax rate has declined from 30 to 20 percent over the last 15 years, and about two-thirds of this decline can be attributed to increased international tax avoidance. Globally, 8 percent of the world's personal financial wealth is held offshore, costing more than $200 billion to governments every year. Despite ambitious policy initiatives, profit shifting to tax havens and offshore wealth are rising. I discuss the recent proposals made to address these issues, and I argue that the main objective should be to create a world financial registry.
THE MISSING WEALTH OF NATIONS Zucman, Gabriel
The Quarterly journal of economics,
08/2013, Letnik:
128, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
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This article shows that official statistics substantially underestimate the net foreign asset positions of rich countries because they fail to capture most of the assets held by households in ...offshore tax havens. Drawing on a unique Swiss data set and exploiting systematic anomalies in countries’ portfolio investment positions, I find that around 8% of the global financial wealth of households is held in tax havens, three-quarters of which goes unrecorded. On the basis of plausible assumptions, accounting for unrecorded assets turns the eurozone, officially the world’s second largest net debtor, into a net creditor. It also reduces the U.S. net debt significantly. The results shed new light on global imbalances and challenge the widespread view that after a decade of poor-to-rich capital flows, external assets are now in poor countries and debts in rich countries. I provide concrete proposals to improve international statistics.
Global Wealth Inequality Zucman, Gabriel
Annual review of economics,
08/2019, Letnik:
11, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
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This article reviews the recent literature on the dynamics of global wealth inequality. I first reconcile available estimates of wealth inequality in the United States. Both surveys and tax data show ...that wealth inequality has increased dramatically since the 1980s, with a top 1% wealth share of approximately 40% in 2016 versus 25-30% in the 1980s. Second, I discuss the fast-growing literature on wealth inequality across the world. Evidence points toward a rise in global wealth concentration: For China, Europe, and the United States combined, the top 1% wealth share has increased from 28% in 1980 to 33% today, while the bottom 75% share hovered around 10%. Recent studies, however, may underestimate the level and rise of inequality, as financial globalization makes it increasingly hard to measure wealth at the top. I discuss how new data sources (leaks from financial institutions, tax amnesties, and macroeconomic statistics of tax havens) can be leveraged to better capture the wealth of the rich.
CAPITAL IS BACK Piketty, Thomas; Zucman, Gabriel
The Quarterly journal of economics,
08/2014, Letnik:
129, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
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How do aggregate wealth-to-income ratios evolve in the long run and why? We address this question using 1970–2010 national balance sheets recently compiled in the top eight developed economies. For ...the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, and France, we are able to extend our analysis as far back as 1700. We find in every country a gradual rise‘ of wealth-income ratios in recent decades, from about 200–300% in 1970 to 400–600% in 2010. In effect, today’s ratios appear to be returning to the high values observed in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (600–700%). This can be explained by a long-run asset price recovery (itself driven by changes in capital policies since the world wars) and by the slowdown of productivity and population growth, in line with the
β
=
s
g
Harrod-Domar-Solow formula. That is, for a given net saving rate s=10%, the long-run wealth-income ratio β is about 300% if g=3% and 600% if g=1.5%. Our results have implications for capital taxation and regulation and shed new light on the changing nature of wealth, the shape of the production function, and the rise of capital shares.
We combine national accounts, surveys, and new tax data to study the accumulation and distribution of income and wealth in China from 1978 to 2015. The national wealth-income ratio increased from 350 ...percent in 1978 to 700 percent in 2015, while the share of public property in national wealth declined from 70 percent to 30 percent. We provide sharp upward revision of official inequality estimates. The top 10 percent income share rose from 27 percent to 41 percent between 1978 and 2015; the bottom 50 percent share dropped from 27 percent to 15 percent. China’s inequality levels used to be close to Nordic countries and are now approaching US levels.
This paper presents new findings on global inequality dynamics from the World Wealth and Income Database (WID.world), with particular emphasis on the contrast between the trends observed in the ...United States, China, France, and the United Kingdom. We observe rising top income and wealth shares in nearly all countries in recent decades. But the magnitude of the increase varies substantially, thereby suggesting that different country-specific policies and institutions matter considerably. Long-run wealth inequality dynamics appear to be highly unstable. We stress the need for more democratic transparency on income and wealth dynamics and better access to administrative and financial data.
This article first describes the main developments in measuring the upper tail of the income and wealth distributions over the last twenty years. Second, it points out some of the key methodological ...challenges and how better data could address them. Third, it discusses the academic and policy impacts of upper tail measurement.
This paper studies inequality in America through the lens of distributional macroeconomic accounts—comprehensive distributions of the aggregate amount of income and wealth recorded in the official ...macroeconomic accounts of the United States. We use these distributional macroeconomic accounts to quantify the rise of income and wealth concentration since the late 1970s, the change in tax progressivity, and the direct redistributive effects of government intervention in the economy. Between 1978 and 2018, the share of pre-tax income earned by the top 1 percent rose from 10 percent to about 19 percent, and the share of wealth owned by the top 0.1 percent rose from 7 percent to about 18 percent. In 2018, the tax system was regressive at the top-end; the top 400 wealthiest Americans paid a lower average tax rate than the macroeconomic tax rate of 29 percent. We confront our methods and findings with those of other studies, pinpoint the areas where more research is needed, and describe how additional data collection could improve inequality measurement.
DISTRIBUTIONAL NATIONAL ACCOUNTS Piketty, Thomas; Saez, Emmanuel; Zucman, Gabriel
IDEAS Working Paper Series from RePEc,
05/2018, Letnik:
133, Številka:
2
Journal Article, Paper
Recenzirano
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This article combines tax, survey, and national accounts data to estimate the distribution of national income in the United States since 1913. Our distributional national accounts capture 100% of ...national income, allowing us to compute growth rates for each quantile of the income distribution consistent with macroeconomic growth. We estimate the distribution of both pretax and posttax income, making it possible to provide a comprehensive view of how government redistribution affects inequality. Average pretax real national income per adult has increased 60% from 1980 to 2014, but we find that it has stagnated for the bottom 50% of the distribution at about $16,000 a year. The pretax income of the middle class—adults between the median and the 90th percentile—has grown 40% since 1980, faster than what tax and survey data suggest, due in particular to the rise of tax-exempt fringe benefits. Income has boomed at the top. The upsurge of top incomes was first a labor income phenomenon but has mostly been a capital income phenomenon since 2000. The government has offset only a small fraction of the increase in inequality. The reduction of the gender gap in earnings has mitigated the increase in inequality among adults, but the share of women falls steeply as one moves up the labor income distribution, and is only 11% in the top 0.1% in 2014.
Progressive Wealth Taxation SAEZ, EMMANUEL; ZUCMAN, GABRIEL
Brookings papers on economic activity,
10/2019, Letnik:
2019, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
This paper discusses the progressive taxation of household wealth. We first discuss what wealth is, how it is distributed, and how much revenue a progressive wealth tax could generate in the United ...States. We try to reconcile discrepancies across wealth data sources. Second, we discuss the role a wealth tax can play to increase the overall progressivity of the U.S. tax system. Third, we discuss the empirical evidence on wealth tax avoidance and evasion as well as tax enforcement policies. We summarize the key elements needed to make a U.S. wealth tax work in light of the experience of other countries. Fourth, we discuss the real economic effects of wealth taxation on inequality, the capital stock, and economic activity. Fifth, we present a simple tractable model of the taxation of billionaires’ wealth that can be applied to the Forbes list of the four hundred richest Americans since 1982 to illustrate the long-run effects of concrete wealth tax proposals on top fortunes.