The case for a progressive annual wealth tax in the UK updated

Benjamin Tippet, Özlem Onaran and Rafael Wildauer

No 47322, Greenwich Papers in Political Economy from University of Greenwich, Greenwich Political Economy Research Centre

Abstract: This paper analyses the revenue potential of a progressive annual net wealth tax in the UK. A progressive net wealth tax is a tax on the stock of net wealth that is designed to raise revenues primarily from the wealthiest individuals. We present a baseline progressive net wealth tax that only taxes the top 1% wealthiest individuals. Individuals with net wealth above £2.2 million (the top 1%) are taxed at a marginal rate of 1%; above £3.6 million (the top 0.5%) at a marginal rate of 2% and above £11.2 million (the top 0.1%) at a marginal rate of 4%. We estimate that in 2018-2020 this tax would have raised between £46 and 78 billion a year after administration costs. It would raise £46 billion if 50% of the tax is avoided, £69bn if 25% of the tax is avoided, and £78 billion if 15% of the tax is avoided. This is equivalent to roughly 8-12% of total tax revenues taken by the UK government in that year. This work updates a previous working paper from 2021.

Keywords: wealth inequality; wealth tax; fiscal policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024-06-03
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://gala.gre.ac.uk/id/eprint/47322/20/47322%20 ... %20PAPER%29_2024.pdf

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gpe:wpaper:47322

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Greenwich Papers in Political Economy from University of Greenwich, Greenwich Political Economy Research Centre Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Nadine Edwards ().