The fiscal truths of Zucman | Economy | EUROtoday

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If a reader enters the EU Fiscal Observatory web page, it stumbles upon entry with a graph that explains the vintage of European and world tax techniques. It seems that the typical fiscal sort paid by firms has fallen from 50% in 1985 to 21% in 2020. The director of this Observatory is Gabriel Zucman (Paris, 1986), a French economist, a professor on the University of Berkeley, who has turn out to be an authority within the educational world for his research on tax evasion and inequality.

Last 12 months, Zucman was invited by Brazil to the G-20 assembly, the place he proposed to use a minimal 2% tax to property exceeding 100 million euros. The measure would enable to lift 67,000 million extra euros yearly. The basis of your proposal is that the focus of wealth, more and more in much less fingers, is facilitating tax evasion. The current examine The Tax on Millionaires: dynamics of wealth and assortment of a world taxready by Zucman, Kane Borders and Panayiotis Nicolaides for the Royal Institute Elcano, highlights that “the number of people with a heritage greater than 1,000 million dollars has passed 140 people in the 80s of the 20th century to 2,781 millmillonarios today”.

The examine confirms “the fiscal deficit of individuals with great assets” and states that “the percentage of income taxes falls drastically into the highest part.” In brief, “most of the population of a country pays between 25% and 50% of its tax revenues throughout the distribution of income, while the millmillionaires and one hundred millionaires pay between 20% and 25%.” The authors emphasize that the richness of the Milmillonarios, who symbolize 0.0001% of the world’s inhabitants, has risen from 3% to 13.5% of world GDP within the final 4 a long time. And they warn that “in the absence of policies that face the tax deficit of the Millonarios, the richness of this group will continue to rise up to 20% of the world GDP from here to 10 years.”

Zucman’s proposal has entered totally into the political battle of France, suffocated by a galloping public deficit, the place billionaires pay half of taxes that the typical Frenchman. In an interview in The worldZucman defined that 2% just isn’t a randomly chosen determine: “It is the rate that allows the tax not to be regressive. With 2% billionaires will pay so much but no more than the social categories located below them, as executives to simplify.”

The initiative has acquired the assist of seven economists awarded with the Nobel Prize and different excellent consultants not exactly from the left corresponding to Olivier Blanchard, Jean Pisani – Ferry and Patrick Artus. The present debate doesn’t appear an educational situation, however reasonably the reflection of the suffocating energy of financial lobbies, the best threat consider political and social stability.

https://elpais.com/economia/2025-09-22/las-verdades-fiscales-de-zucman.html