Insight On The Richest 1%

The richest 1 per cent have since the mid-nineties captured 38 per cent of wealth growth globally, said an annual report that called for “modernising tax systems” to reduce inequality.

The richest 10 per cent own around 60-80 per cent of wealth and the poorest half less than 5 per cent of wealth, said the World Inequality Report 2022 that will be published by the Harvard University Press on December 7.

Global billionaire wealth in 2021 represents 3.5 per cent of the world’s household wealth, with share of the global top 0.01 per cent up from 7 per cent of global wealth in 1995 to 11 per cent this year, The Indian Express quoted the report as saying on Thursday.

The report suggested developing new forms of wealth taxation on multimillionaires, including a progressive rate of wealth tax with tax rates according to the value of the total amount of wealth owned. Tax ranging from 1 per cent of wealth owned over $1 million to 3 per cent for global billionaires can generate 1.6 per cent of global income.

The report estimates that a 15 per cent minimum corporate tax—”very low” would lead to revenue gains of 83.3 billion euros in EU, 57.0 billion euros in the US, 6.1 billion euros in China and 0.5 billion euros in India.

“We propose a global wealth tax on multi millionaires, people who own more than a million dollars or euros and this tax in this proposal is progressive, meaning that the rates are going to be according to the value of the total amount of wealth that you own,” said Lucas Chancel, co-director at World Inequality Lab at a pre-briefing meet on the report.

“In countries, where wealth is highly concentrated, more rates on the stock of wealth of very wealthy individuals can deliver high amounts of revenues,” the Express quoted Chancel as saying.

“Women today get just one-third of all labour income in the world whereas gender parity would mean they get half of that. But currently women earn just one-third of all incomes from work and the situation has increased since the 1990s but at a very slow rate. If we continue at this rate, we need to wait at least a century to reach gender parity,” Chancel said.

The report is co-authored by Chancel, Emmanuel Saez, Gabriel Zucman and Thomas Piketty, the French economist whose book ‘Capital in the Twenty-first Century’ made him a celebrity when it was published in 2013.