TY  - JOUR
AU  - Alstadsæter, Annette
AU  - Johannesen, Niels
AU  - Zucman, Gabriel
TI  - Who Owns the Wealth in Tax Havens? Macro Evidence and Implications for Global Inequality
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 23805
PY  - 2017
Y2  - September 2017
DO  - 10.3386/w23805
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w23805
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w23805.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Annette Alstadsæter
School of Economics and Business  
Norwegian University of Life Sciences  
P.O. Box 5003, NO-1432 Ås  
Norway
E-Mail: annette.alstadsater@nmbu.no

Niels Johannesen
University of Copenhagen
Department of Economics
and CEBI
E-Mail: niels.johannesen@econ.ku.dk

Gabriel Zucman
Department of Economics
University of California, Berkeley
530 Evans Hall, #3880
Berkeley, CA 94720
E-Mail: zucman@berkeley.edu
M2  - featured in NBER digest on 2018-10-16
AB  - Drawing on newly published macroeconomic statistics, this paper estimates the amount of household wealth owned by each country in offshore tax havens. The equivalent of 10% of world GDP is held in tax havens globally, but this average masks a great deal of heterogeneity—from a few percent of GDP in Scandinavia, to about 15% in Continental Europe, and 60% in Gulf countries and some Latin American economies. We use these estimates to construct revised series of top wealth shares in ten countries, which account for close to half of world GDP. Because offshore wealth is very concentrated at the top, accounting for it increases the top 0.01% wealth share substantially in Europe, even in countries that do not use tax havens extensively. It has considerable effects in Russia, where the vast majority of wealth at the top is held offshore. These results highlight the importance of looking beyond tax and survey data to study wealth accumulation among the very rich in a globalized world.
ER  -