Scenarios and distributional implications of a household wealth tax in Ireland

Abstract

This paper aims to provide as comprehensive an analysis as possible of the wealth holdings of Irish households and the potential implications that a wealth tax could have, if applied to the existing structure of assets and household composition. To provide a broad range of estimates and to illustrate the different effects of adjusting threshold levels and including or exempting specific assets, we calculated our wealth tax revenues and households liable using two different approaches. The first approach took the existing wealth tax structures of a number of European countries and applied them to the Irish household structure. The second used a range of hypothetical combinations of threshold level and asset exemptions to go more deeply into their respective impacts on the revenues and numbers of households that would be liable under different tax designs.