Tuesday, March 8, 2016

$7.6 TRILLION IN TAX HAVENS

“Gabriel Zucman, who teaches at the University of California at Berkeley,
has two goals in his new
book, The Hidden Wealth of Nations: to specify the
costs of tax havens, and to figure ou
t how to reduce those costs. While much
of his ana
lysis is technical, he writes with moral passion, even outrage; he
sees tax havens
as a ‘scourge.’ His figures are arresting. About 8 percent of
the world's wealth,
or $7.6 trillion, is held in tax havens. In 2015,
Switzerl
and alone held $2.3 trillion in foreign wealth. As a result of fraud from
unreported foreign accounts
, governments around the world lose about
$200 billion in tax revenue each year. Most of this amount comes from the evasion
of taxes on investment income, but a significant chunk comes from fraud
on inheritances
. In the United States, the annual tax loss is $35 billion; in
Europe, it is $78 billion. In African nations, it is $14 billion.”



Sunstein, Cass R, ‘Parking the Big Money,’ in The New York Review, January 14, 2016, pp: 37-38, a review of The Hidden Wealth of Nations: The Scourge of Tax Havens, by Gabriel Zucman, University of Chicago Press, 2015.