Income, Wealth, and Redistribution in a Tax Haven: Distributional National Accounts for Switzerland

Enea Baselgia, Remo Gurtner, Julian Koller, Isabel Z. Martínez and Isabel Z. Martínez

No 12977, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: This paper analyzes the composition and distribution of national income, private wealth, and the extent of redistribution in Switzerland from 2003 to 2022, combining micro tax, survey, and national accounts data. Constructing Distributional National Accounts (DINA) requires addressing two features of the Swiss setting. Switzerland is a tax haven, so we correct for cross-border profit shifting by multinationals. It is also fiscally decentralized. Lacking nationally representative tax microdata, we reweight cantonal micro tax records to match national distributions. We find that pre-tax income inequality is substantially higher than suggested by tax statistics: the top 1% income share increases by 50% once retained earnings and privileged dividends are included. Compared to previous estimates, wealth inequality is somewhat higher but shows no upward trend. The overall Swiss tax-and-transfer system is close to flat across most of the distribution, at around 45% of pre-tax income, declining to below 30% for the top 0.01%.

Keywords: inequality; distributional national accounts; redistribution; Switzerland (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D31 E01 H2 H5 H77 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.ifo.de/DocDL/cesifo1_wp12977.pdf (application/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:ces:ceswps:_12977

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().