It will be unpopular, and is not currently on the European agenda under the Recovery Plan, but the idea of increasing the tax on inheritance and donations must be considered. This is supported by an OECD report which provides some data that are in some ways merciless, and which above all makes it a ethical and political as well as financial question: higher revenue would help public finances and help reduce inequality and the concentration of large estates. As regards the contribution that today the inheritance tax makes to the budgets of OECD countries, the 2019 figure speaks for itself: 0,5% on average, with France and Belgium approaching 1,5% and only Korea South that surpasses it. Italy is the sixth "worst" country, with an almost irrelevant contribution, less than 0,2%. Only Portugal (where the tax does not even exist), Lithuania, Poland, Hungary and Slovenia do less. In total, the figure is less than 0,25% in 9 countries out of 36 OECD members.
In the meantime, according to the organization, this situation is being created by the increasingly frequent tax breaks, but also by some increasingly sophisticated formulas of tax "optimization", so to speak, for example through trusts. Not to mention the real tax fraud, notoriously feasible through offshore havens, by transferring one's account to countries where banking secrecy still exists or by finding one of the many ways to evade the tax. "Taxes on inheritance and gifts should have a greater weight in the member countries", argues the OECD which raises the alarm above all on the concentration of wealth, which tends to become more and more accentuated. Especially after 2020, which was marked by the pandemic and the economic crisis, but which was a year to remember for billionaires from all over the world. Leaving aside the extreme cases of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, the fortunes of billionaires have grown by 14% in Europe, 25% in North America and 50% in Asia.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, the assets of the top 10 billionaires in the world have increased by a total of 540 billion dollars. In the world today, the richest 10% hold over half of global wealth, on average. A few hundred of the super rich own as much as 4,6 billion other people. While bottom 50% have less than 1%. It is also for this reason that the OECD calls for a change of pace: the theme in this case is not to hit the assets of individual people, but to ensure that wealth is not perpetuated forever in the hands of a few dozen families, to the detriment of others and public coffers.
