Economic inequality in India can be remedied through wealth tax on richest 0.04%: Report
The revenue generated can be directly transferred to the bank accounts of the poor and be used to increase social spending, said the authors of the study.
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India’s growing income and wealth inequality can be remedied by introducing a comprehensive and progressive wealth tax package for the ultra-rich, a report published on Friday by World Inequality Lab has suggested.
The report is a follow-up to a World Inequality Lab study – Income and wealth inequality in India, 1922-2023: The rise of the Billionaire Raj – published on March 19. Authored by economists Nitin Kumar Bharti, Lucas Chancel, Thomas Piketty and Anmol Somanchi, it showed that the income and wealth share of India’s richest 1% of India’s population are at their highest in the country’s history.
The richest 1% of India’s population held 22.6% of the country’s income and 40.1% of wealth in 2022-’23, the study claimed, pointing out that the rise of top-end inequality in India has been particularly pronounced in terms of wealth concentration between 2014-’15 and 2022-’23.
Building on these findings, the same authors have now proposed a “crorepati tax” in their new report, proposed to be paid only by those whose net wealth exceeded Rs 10 crore in 2022-’23.
“Based on our latest estimates, only the top 0.04% of adults would fall above this threshold,” said the report.
The authors have proposed three variants of the tax package: baseline, moderate and ambitious.
In the baseline variant, an annual tax...
