India Gets Highest Repressive Tax Recommendations From IMF: Oxfam
Oxfam examined the IMF’s tax advice to 125 countries between 2022 and 2024. Despite the rapid growth of extreme wealth ―billionaire wealth has surged by 81 percent since 2020― just 30 of 1,049 tax recommendations focus on net wealth taxes and the taxation of income from wealth, namely capital gains
Chennai: Despite the gap between the rich and poor increasing in recent times, India received the highest number of regressive tax recommendations from the IMF, finds Oxfam.
Only 3 per cent of the more than 1,000 tax recommendations made by the IMF to different governments in recent years focus on taxing wealth and income from wealth.
Oxfam examined the IMF’s tax advice to 125 countries between 2022 and 2024. Despite the rapid growth of extreme wealth ―billionaire wealth has surged by 81 percent since 2020― just 30 of 1,049 tax recommendations focus on net wealth taxes and the taxation of income from wealth, namely capital gains.
About 52 per cent of tax advice to high-income countries was progressive - advising higher tax rates on higher income levels to reduce inequality. On the other hand, 59 per cent of tax advice to low- and lower-middle-income countries was regressive - flat or declining rate that disproportionately burdens lower-income individuals.
IMF tax advice to Canada and the United States was overwhelmingly progressive, while advice to South Asia was by far the most regressive, followed by Latin America and the Caribbean, and sub-Saharan Africa. India received the highest number of regressive recommendations.
In the past 25 years, the gap between the richest 1 percent and the poorest 50 percent has grown in twice as many low- and middle-income countries that received mostly regressive IMF tax advice (25 percent) than in those that received mostly progressive advice (11 percent).
“As billionaire fortunes grow at extraordinary speed, the IMF’s silence on taxing extreme wealth is increasingly untenable,” said Kate Donald, Head of Oxfam International’s Washington DC Office. “The Fund is reinforcing a system in which ordinary people —already strangled by rising prices— are forced to shoulder the brunt of taxes. Meanwhile, vast concentrations of obscene wealth remain largely untaxed. Serious fiscal reform should start with those most able to contribute,” she said.
