Daily Times

Rising financial inequality can be tackled and public finances improved at the same time by hiking inheritance, estate and gift taxes, the OECD said in a report Tuesday. The report on inheritance taxation highlighted that the richest 10 percent of households across 27 OECD states are estimated to own around half those countries’ total wealth, with the richest one percent holding 18 percent. “Inheritance taxation can be an important instrument to address inequality, particularly in the current context of persistently high wealth inequality and new pressures on public finances linked to the COVID-19 pandemic,” said the report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. It noted that a majority of OECD countries levy inheritance or estate taxes yet typically raise very little revenue with them — just 0.5 percent of total tax revenues on average, Pascal Saint-Amans, director of the OECD Centre for Tax Policy and Administration, told a press conference.