good evening everybody and thank you very much for participating in this lecture my australis which is also going to open a debate about a very present time topic tax equity after covet 19 should we actually tax the wealthiest that's a great question baby you remember that during the product government in 2008 minister st padres kyopa said that it was wonderful to pay taxes i believe nobody else repeated that sentence imposing taxes on citizens has always been difficult for every government when they try to find a good motivation to do that i think about the euro tax for instance or taxes that were targeting a specific purpose well today we have professor david stasavage director of department social sciences at the new york university and who's connected right now with us and a julia silver professor at the department of political sciences of new york university together with genetics he has written the book taxing the rich a global history of fiscal fairness in the united states and europe and also the book the decline in rise of democracy a global history from antiquity to today we will talk about this topic next time so today we're here to talk about taxing the rich and before giving the floor to professors tasaraj i would like to give you some food for thought um providing the professor with some italian insights well as you all know very well nobody thought that tax would be a topic in a moment like this one after the pandemic the rising public spending subsidies for the unemployed the state playing an active role in the economy the fema this festival so there was a lot of talk about the post kovid economy nobody thought about texas but the secretary of the democratic party mr letter introduced this topic making a proposal which is that of taxing the rich specifically increasing the rate of the inheritance tax to guarantee young people from 13 to 16 with a fund to be used in a specific way this has not been explained very well but the idea was that of using this money for education from starting entrepreneurial activities for buying a house and few know that italy is one of the countries that has the lowest inheritance tax rate only four percent versus 30 percent in germany 34 in spain 40 in the uk and 45 percent in france however minister letter insisted on his proposal claiming that it was an important one since rich individuals people inheriting from rich relatives have no merit in having that wealth and this is why they can be taxed more easily than others but the most incredible thing is that nobody actually thought about the other side of the proposal which is redistribution the fact that the youngest we're going to benefit from this and we have no other alternative proposals to this one so mr letter has to make a step backward and explain that he had been inspired by the biden model who asked together with the press in the united states the one percent of the richest in the us to support the weakest and some of the richest have actually agreed on that showing some generosity however the criticism in italy has been greater than the positive reactions let's go through the criticism in the yes because i believe that the professor will talk about this the first criticism is there are other priorities then we need an overall tax reform and i believe that the president uh the cabinet said that the italian tax pressure is already very high in italy transferring inheritance takes place through companies that actually elope taxation and finally mr luca the president of the company region claimed that this is a self-mutilating act that causes diffidence and barriers in the relationship with the production with the productive class so professor why is it so difficult to text the rich is is so difficult also in an exceptional period like this one in which asking those who have more especially those who have accumulated this wealth because of the emergency is it so wrong well in his book professor stavanges goes through two centuries of history in 20 western countries together with his colleague professor stasavash has explained why it is so difficult to touch your reach and when it is possible to do that well welcome professor stavis you have the floor thank you very much for that thoughtful introduction thank you to the organizers for inviting me and thank you to those who are here attending uh this evening this afternoon here in new york uh i hope that next time next year when this festival happens again everybody can be uh in in person like like back to normal so uh as what we're going to talk about tonight as as the introduction already said is is the the question of taxing the wealthy uh i will talk about the international context but also the italian context and i'm going to talk about that particularly in light of the covid crisis uh and whether the covid crisis that we've been experiencing over the last year and a half uh creates a new argument on the basis of economic fairness for for taxing the wealthy so so let me proceed with my slides here that i'll show you so the underlying question is is is is covet 19 given us a new tag a new reason for taxing the wealthy that we haven't had in recent years and one question we might say and this is referring to that italian political debate as i understand it mario draghi made a comment saying that now is the time to give not to take and certainly in a crisis we need to give people need to make sacrifices and i think he was probably referring to the interpretation as whether he was referring to the overall level of taxation or um fiscal pressure if you want to call it from using the italian term translated into english or whether there might be a possibility to maintain the same overall level of taxation in italy while perhaps adjusting some taxes upwards and other taxes downwards or something like that and so the question that i think we need to ask uh is going to be having to do with this is a time to give that's a during a crisis but we need to think about the fact that there are a great number of people who have already given so much over the past year and a half whether you're talking about italy or the united states or the united kingdom or any western country really that's been hit by hard by covid we have people who have lost family members we have people who have because of necessary lockdowns uh lost business and income we have young people who have seen their their education uh compromised as a result of things going online and so we have a whole host of people who in in a sense have already sacrificed a great deal and so what i would suggest that we want to ask then is whether if so many people have already sacrificed should we add or ask for an additional sacrifice uh from the wealthy as a way of uh restoring uh some measure of economic fairness and to do this uh what i'm going to do is i'm going to talk about the history because i think it's very useful to think about history over the very long run to ask when is it that governments actually do something like taxing the whale fee or taxing the rich at significant rates whether you're talking about income taxation or whether you're talking about inheritance testation and so this is our book that we published five years ago uh that i think has become relevant again because of covid with my co-author ken shivey who is at yale uh we spent a number of years collecting data on tax rates for 20 countries in western europe and north america over a very long time frame from roughly 1800 up to the present day this took a lot of time because it's hard to find historical tax rates often and what we did with this data we used it in a way to sort of ask this or respond to this question of what is it that actually what are the kinds of situations when governments will tax the wealthy heavily and to show you some of our conclusions and then move back to what that implies for the covet 19 crisis i'm going to show you three three separate graphs uh the first of these is this is a graph showing across these 20 countries what was the average top marginal rate of income and inheritance taxation from 1800 to 2013. now again the top marginal rate of taxation refers to the rate paid on the last euro of income or wealth then you will see several clear things from this figure the first of these is that the 19th century uh un un invariably uh was a period of extremely low taxation on the wealthy uh intra income or inheritance taxes if they even existed were never more than one or two or three or four percent or something like that and so that's absolutely fascinating to consider that even as many countries were democratizing at the end of the 19th century in the early part of the 20th century their tax rate their top tax rates on the wealthy whether it was an income tax or inheritance tax often stayed very low uh and just to foreshadow things the inheritance taxation of the 19th century was a little bit closer to your top rate of of inheritance taxation in italy today which is indeed low so that's the sort of first thing we conclude from this is that the 19th century is a long error of low taxation on the wealthy but then the second thing we conclude is that it seems like right around 1914 around the outset of world war one and continuing through a better part of the 20th century was a period of steeply increasing taxes on income uh and on inheritance so the average top income tax by the end of world war ii the top rate was over 60 percent uh the average top inheritance tax rate uh by the end of world war ii was 40 and so we could think of the fact that it seems that governments were raising top tax rates during an era of mass warfare and also economic depression of course we should mention with the economic depression of the 1930s then what we've seen since then has been a slow but steady decrease in average top income tax rates and average top inheritance tax rates in fact many some countries have gotten away with their inheritance tax done away with their inheritance tax entirely uh all governments have invariably cut top income tax rates from what they were even though they're still much higher than the 19th century so then we have three big periods we have a period of the 19th century of low taxation the world wars and the great depression show us a period of increasing taxation on the rich and then the finally recent decades have seen a decrease in taxes on the rich and so you might ask can we show more evidence to say that this was somehow linked to the war well let me focus in and zoom in on what happened to top marginal rates of income taxation during the period of world war one this graph breaks things down in our data between two sets of countries those that mobilized for war and those that did not mobilize for war and what you're going to see here is that the huge tax increase occurred predominantly in the countries that mobilized for war again on the left part of the graph we see those low part low rates that were predominant in the 19th century in the first decade or so of the 20th century then a drastic increase in world war one or immediately after it and then rates staying high after that point so there was a very big disjuncture between countries that mobilized for war and countries that didn't mobilize for war now one of the things that you might immediately ask is does this have anything to do with arguments that were made at the time about economic fairness it doesn't necessarily have to be the case you might say well governments that uh needed to finance wars needed to find taxes um and they and and it was logical to tax the rich there's a famous line from a american bank robber of decades past named willie sutton when they asked him why he robbed banks he said that's because that's where the money is and so in essence you might think that governments raise taxes on the rich during war time because that's where the money was that's an interesting argument but there's another twist to this story that makes that a little bit less likely and it suggests that was something about the nature of the political arguments that were going on that made the difference what we're going to do next and this is the third graph i'll show you is we're going to distinguish between governments that mobilize for war who were democracies and governments who mobilized for world war one who were done not democracies and that's what we see here what you see zooming in on the world war one period is that governments that were democracies like england like the united states like canada that mobilized for world war one had heavy heavy increases in top tax rates for income whereas governments that were not democracies like say uh wilhelmine germany uh did not raise their taxes top tax rates very much at all so that's an interesting bifurcation and it suggests that there's something about democratic politics that may have prompted governments to tax the rich more heavily it wasn't just because that was the only place you could find money because governments could have raised taxes on indirect taxes like common consumption taxes that existed at the time uh the ancestors of the sales taxes or vat that we pay today and that would have been an option as well but they didn't do that they chose to predominantly use this method of taxing those at the top of the income and wealth scale quite heavily so that's that's a really interesting finding what we try to argue in the book is that the nature of this movement to tax the rich in war mobilizers who were democracies was driven above all by arguments about economic fairness and particularly by something that i'm going to call a compensatory argument and the compensatory argument is something that i'm going to emphasize because i'm going to come back to that when we discuss the current state of taxing the wealthy in italy or elsewhere and the implications of covet 19. so what we argue is that the wartime context gave political parties of the left a new argument for taxing the rich in famously in the uk the labour party referred to this as a conscription of wealth and so what they meant was that this is a compensatory argument for taxing wealth that was introduced by the labor party in the uk in 1916 and we they said it was compensatory or i suggesting it was compensatory because a conscription of wealth via taxation meaning what they didn't mean is literally just go out and bang down doors and take the wealth but what they meant by conscription of wealth is that as a shorthand for raising top rates of income tax and taxation and raising top rates of inheritance taxation was something that was necessary on fairness grounds because many people of course had had their labor uh and sometimes even then often even their lives conscripted for the war effort and there was a clear difference of the same that's being referred to in italy today about inheritance taxation and the old of the young of course people who were conscripted for the war effort uh were young they it was not 40 and 50 year olds who were who tended to be conscripted for the war effort uh but we know that in most any society and certainly in the societies in western europe that we have today or that we had then that the amount of personal wealth tends to be correlated with age and people who are older tend to have higher levels of personal wealth uh than the young do and so the argument was made at the time in world war one or its immediate aftermath that because of this age differential there ought to be a way in which those who had wealth who were older on hold should somehow compensate those who had had their labor conscripted in the war effort so again it's a compensatory argument for taxation it's a it's a type of argument for taxation of the wealthy that doesn't often occur it has to be during a very specific historical circumstance like a war like an economic crisis or perhaps like the covet 19 crisis to say uh this is a time where for some reason we've had actions taken by the state such as conscripting labor for war which was necessary and that action no matter how necessary it was had an unequal placed an unequal burden on people some people were burdened by it more than others and therefore we ought to use the tax system to correct that inequity to compensate for it the other key element to the war at this time which we'll also get to and is relevant for covet 19 of course is that not there was not only the issue of conscription there was the issue that while some people had their labor conscripted for the war effort others who had wealth um and owned companies that suddenly found higher demand for their products earned what became to be called war profits and so in many countries there was there were taxes adopted to try to determine what excess profits had happened as a result of the war and to tax those at a very high rate because they were seen as gains that were not exactly fair because while some people were being asked to sacrifice otherwise we're benefiting financially from the war effort so there are some very potent arguments made about war profits taxes so that is the the historical background i think what it suggests to us is that the times in when governments really move to raise taxes on the wealthy tend to be during these epochs where there is a an opportunity for making a compensatory argument that says that the state has abide by some people to sacrifice uh whereas the wealthy have not sacrificed as much and therefore perhaps there could be an argument for taxing the wealthy at higher rates in order to come compensate and to restore a measure of economic fairness so the question we should come to next is whether covet 19 has created a new argument for taxing the wealthy and whether it's an argument of this type that occurred during the two world wars uh or during the economic depression of the 1930s so one of the things we know from the covid crisis is that just as happened during the two world wars governments took necessary actions but those necessary actions sometimes hurt some people more than others and they sometimes benefited some people more than others so the first obvious example in many countries we had lockdowns quite severe lockdowns even these were necessary to prevent the spread of the virus this is something that had to be done it wasn't worth trying to say we won't do a lockdown um it was a there was a very strong and public health impetus for it but we also know that the lockdowns impacted some people more than others they impacted some businesses more than others businesses that did direct retail rather than online retail they impacted some people more than others and that some people have jobs where they could work online at home and continue their employment um not you know and not heavily perturbed by the pandemic whereas others have jobs or had jobs where that was simply not possible and so out as necessary as the lockdowns were they created a cleavage between those who were hurt by them and those who were less hurt by them because they could adapt more easily just because the nature of their employment allowed them to do that so that raises a question immediately of well should there be an argument for somehow tilting the tax system so that the people who sacrificed so much because of the lockdown would find themselves less burdened again to restore some measure of economic fairness now the second argument i think that could be made uh for this kind of mechanism uh has to do with the interventions that central banks have taken to prop up stock markets as a result of the economic crisis from coven these interventions most economists were say were very necessary they were necessary to prevent a broader economic crisis that word of health hurt everybody no one likes a stock market crash it's not good for the economy but it's also very clear that some people some people benefited more from this policy than others people who already had wealth or lots of wealth uh were the ones who would benefit in the most immediate sense uh from from having these market interventions propping up stock markets so well everybody would benefit from not having an enduring and generalized economic crisis caused by a stock market crash those who had money in the markets and have money in the market still have been the most immediate beneficiaries so again we have a necessary government policy that nonetheless no matter how necessary it was created an inequity between different groups of individuals and this in this case between those with wealth and those without wealth because of course many people don't have significant wealth apart from what they might have if they own their house or an automobile or something like that so what we could say then is that given these arguments about the differential effect of lockdowns and interventions to prop up stock markets and we could probably come up with other examples and we can certainly do that in the discussion when that happens i think there's an argument for saying that the compensatory standard for fairness would call for using the fiscal system to restore a measure of economic fairness so in the first instance if you're changing or raising taxes or adjusting in that way you shouldn't be raising taxes on those who are most hurt and most impacted by the government interventions to to to involving lockdowns or or market support you should probably be targeting it targeting any tax increases that those who benefited the most and who were less harmed by the necessary actions taken to deal with the crisis and so i think there's a very direct parallel then between the type of compensatory arguments that were made during the period of the two world wars and the type of compensatory argument that could be made today uh in a country like italy or in other countries as well and there's been some discussion of how this might be done and that's what i'd like to turn to next so when we think about what one would do for uh implementing a compensatory tax some people might say well we don't want to change just one tax we want to change the entire fiscal system that is was already referred to the in the introduction and thank you for that uh but there beyond that there have been two specific types of proposals that have been made one proposal has been to have taxes that are temporary suggesting that because this is a temporary crisis we need a temporary tax to deal with it the second method has to do with changing existing taxes and saying while the crisis might be temporary we have existing taxes that are equipped uh or that they'll allow would allow us to deal with this and so let me go through that one proposal uh for the uh the first type a time limited so emmanuel says and gabrielle zuckman two very very well-known economists who work on uh taxation of the wealthy have suggested that at the european level for all of the eu there ought to be negotiations about what they call a time limited annual wealth tax so this would be a tax paid on people who own assets above a certain level but that it would be limited in duration this would you could think of this as being only limited in duration until one deals with the economic consequences of the copic crisis now there is a very strong logic to that i think on economic grounds but on political grounds i think it's a little bit more difficult to envisage and one of the reasons for this is that it's often difficult to implement entirely new taxes such as this there are a few countries in europe that have annual wealth taxes but they're not very common and they involve not only passing a new law but also having a fiscal administration that is equipped to assess wealth on an annual basis so it requires quite a new investment in new types of state capacity and so here again i'll come back to the period of the two world wars we had a similar discussion that occurred after the end of world war one some people called for a one-off levy on wealth holders saying let's just you know tax 10 or 15 of their wealth and there were some attempts to do that in a very few countries but on the whole what happened is that wasn't how wealth was conscripted it was constricted instead by using existing taxes the inheritance tax and the income taxes and raising the rates on those and the reason why that happened politically is the same reason why i think this first option won't happen today is that it's often politically charged and difficult to create to pass new taxes and to create the sort of fiscal administration uh necessary to implement them so the second option would be to say well why don't we look at existing taxes that we have and think about how they might be altered in order to tax those with wealth in order to restore some measure of economic fairness after covert 19. and this was already referred to in the introduction but let me reinforce the point let me show you a graph here which shows the top marginal rates of inheritance taxation across uh the 20 countries in our taxing the rich study and those the these are the rates that are implemented in 2021. and as you can see from this there are several interesting things going on the first thing is that several countries uh and often countries that we don't think of as being liberal being more left in terms of redistribution have eliminated inheritance taxation entirely australia austria new zealand norway even sweden uh and switzerland does not have one at the at the national level but they actually have annual taxes at the cantonal level so a number of countries have just eliminated the inheritance tax and one of the arguments that has been made for that is that it often doesn't end up collecting much money because there are high exemption levels and their rates aren't aren't that high even above those levels and so it will collect something less than one percent of gdp which is a drop in the bucket uh compared to what one needs to fund a modern european state these days but of course it's interesting that a number of countries and germany was already referred to in the introduction but we can go on and we think of other countries that have high uh top marginal rates of inheritance and these are for direct descendants so if you it's a son or daughter for example who inherits an estate they're really quite high by some standards they're they're ten times um uh what some other countries have and so that's that's they've actually maintained those rates and they're significant uh and of course there's been this this case interestingly going further afield in south korea uh where the the top rate is actually 50 that and it actually gets implemented so i think it was someone from samsung recently who passed on and is going to have a significant part of their estate uh taxed away and so there are countries that have abolished their inheritance tax altogether and then there are countries that have kept an inheritance tax uh that applies generally only for large estates uh and where the rates are still significant economically significant and then italy is in a sense in a in a in a third category on its own italy has retained an inheritance tax it hasn't gotten away with it done away with it uh but it has a top rate for direct descendants it is only four percent that is remarkably low uh compared to some of its european neighbors uh and so autumn immediately that raises the question of well if it is so low and we don't want to do away with the inheritance tax then could there be an argument uh for doing something to raise that top marginal rate above four percent so what i would say is that that would be one obvious way to implement a compensatory policy to try to deal with the inequities introduced by the government response to covet 19. and so it would be a classic compensatory argument of the sort that was made during the two world wars so in conclusion let me just wind up here i do think it is the case that the covid crisis has created an argument for using the tax system to restore a degree of economic fairness as important as covid19 has been it's not a crisis nearly as grave as the two world wars so we'd want need to be careful about saying how much one would want to raise taxes on the wealthy in response to it the ri the proper response would probably be much more moderate than something that occurred during the two world wars because the crisis itself has not been of the same order of magnitude but there would be an argument for doing something and the the the issue of the italian inheritance tax is something that seems like it's a it's a it's a ready opportunity and i think we need to distinguish here uh between a couple of things even if rates on inheritance taxation in italy or other countries are raised this is not going to change the fiscal picture dramatically recall that all rich country governments generally take in only about less than one percent of gdp in revenues from an inheritance taxation if they have one uh whereas their total revenues of course are much higher than that and you know 40 and 50 of gdp or something around that so this is going to be a small part it's not going to be a major change um and some people might even say well this is this is this is largely symbolic this is not a major change what we need is that famous uh overall change to the tax and fiscal system that some people will refer to the thing i would say to that is that when we talk about politics when we talk about the politics of taxation when we talk about the politics of redistribution when we talk about politics of national solidarity and uh retaining trust and faith and confidence in how our democracies function that symbols sometimes matter and they often in fact matter a great deal and so even if changes like this did not bring in a major economic shift on a symbolic level they could still be very important indeed and useful for that reason and again just coming back to this i've already i've already said this but italy is really in this is this this category all on its own of having preserved an inheritance tax but having preserved it with a very low rate and so ultimately i think one has to ask uh is there a point at having an inheritance tax with a with such a low rate it would seem like you would want to either go the direction of those countries that have abolished their inheritance tax entirely or you should want to go a bit further towards the direction of those countries that have maintained an air inheritance tax and have had a higher rate than than than than four percent and were it not for the covet crisis it might not be clear which way you should go but i think the covet crisis presents a very clear rationale for saying that that rate could be increased as a compensatory fairness measure to restore some degree of of of economic fairness after all the inequities that have been introduced by the crisis itself thank you thank you very much professor well before giving the floor to our audience i would like to ask a question regarding inheritance tax does the objective one has uh which is related to the inheritance text play a role luigi now they used to claim that the inheritance text should be paid at specific times and it should be destined to specific investments and not to current spending so due to believe that the use of this scenario inheritance text plays a role um yes there are a lot of issues with the inheritance tax that we didn't get a chance to discuss about um lots of economists have written down whether an area in heretics taxation is optimal or not uh i do tend to be some circumstances where it can be and it depends upon some of the assumptions about motives for parents for for for saving for their their children or their offspring or whoever is inheriting it um but i i think the the broader uh rationale comes back to uh some of the the given that we're not talking about attacks again that that raises so much money it probably comes back to more the the the symbol symbolism of the thing and the idea of uh not just restoring an activity in response to covid but also seeing that wealth inequality itself does not continue to increase over time any questions from the audience please come to the microphone i'm sorry but we cannot hear the question well i believe that we should actually try to limit taxation especially after the covet pandemics i mean i do not want to speak out of my own political and ideological ideas i want to consider the fact that we are in a liberal state and i mean we are the children of the french revolution at that time there were three fundamental principles liberty fraternity equality and liberty freedom legality and fraternity in a liberal state cannot be left behind therefore i believe it is absolutely mandatory to eliminate the these equalities that have become bigger and bigger in recent times so also liberal status should consider this thank you so you're telling us that the principle of fairness is not sufficient as a motivation to impose taxes exactly like the professor said you also need a compensatory target and anyway this would not be enough to eliminate there's a quality but there is also a strong um symbolic motivation is that right yes i i was trying to explain that equality is fundamental and this applies also to a liberal state right i recall in the principle of equity and you believe that just this principle makes taxation fair yes it is a natural thing thank you see sure so the question is is equity a good enough motivation to increase taxation do you believe that the principle of equity is sufficient for that i i i think that one of the things that we write in our book is that everybody agrees that a tax system ought to be equitable but there are a lot of different arguments for what equity actually means and so in response to the question i think the the the problem is uh there are some people who think say say some people in my country in the united states think that a a tax system where everybody pays the same rate say a flat tax is actually fair because just like everybody votes and has the same vote in a democracy everybody should pay the same say the paid pay the same tax rate whereas other people disagree with that uh completely uh i think the compensatory argument is something that comes around from time to time uh and it's a measure towards equity but again i think the speaker was referring to a much broader sense of equity which is necessary and of course let me come back to the point i made about the difference between how democracies and non-democracies supported to the war responded to the war it seems to be particularly important in democracies that people care about the fairness of the tax system and the governments therefore respond to it in that way any other questions many have claimed that either you have more than one billion dollars or you live in democracy the two things they claim are incompatible excessive wealth and avoidably leads to excessive political power and for sure a different tax system could probably help reduce this this equality also in the framework of greater justice and democracy but is the tax system sufficient to achieve this target or is it necessary to support it with other measures to prevent jeff visas and all those billionaires just accumulate money in the context of extreme extreme disequality so i'll respond to that so the it's a very interesting question it's actually closer to some of the material that i i wrote about in my more recent book that was published last year the decline in rise of democracy if you look at the historical record it it gives us a nuanced message in response to your question so there's a lot of people out there who will write and suggest that wealth inequality rampant wealth inequality will somehow lead to the end of democracy and there's actually not a lot of evidence for that because at the time european states democratized say in the late 19th and early 20th centuries there was actually a tremendous amount of wealth inequality then uh and democracy survived and it emerged and survived and so if you want to talk about democracy itself dying or failing then i think democracy can survive in the in the face of widespread wealth and equality uh but the problem of course is that it may be that democracy survives but we're not very happy with the type of democracy that does survive uh and so that is an inevitable question in a democracy is to say as long as we have a capitalist economy and we allow for people to invest and produce and some people have different talents and some people are lucky and some people are unlucky then wealth inequality is a natural phenomenon and it's not in itself a bad thing but then the question becomes is there a need to maintain some level of taxation so as to see that wealth inequality does not become too important so that wealth itself does not begin to corrupt the political system uh and of course i've come from a country in the united states where the role of money in the political system is perhaps more important than than in any other uh rich democracy today and you can see that it's not necessarily a positive thing and so i do believe that we didn't get the chance to talk about that in the presentation or the introduction but ultimately that's an open question about going forward as we see levels of wealth equality rising in many countries is that going to lead to a form of democracy where some people inevitably have some people have always had more influence in democracies than others but is that going to exacerbate that problem and i think that's that's an open question any more questions well talking about multinationals the latest initiative by president biden to the rest of the world is that of a minimum universal rate do you think that it can be successful well certainly the extent to which the discussions have moved forward uh suggest that it is has a greater chance of being successful than before if you had asked me that question a few years ago five ten years ago i would have said very very very unlikely but i think there is a sort of changing attitude towards the fact that certain well certain countries which are really just strictly tax havens but not just countries like that countries say like ireland or the netherlands that have an extremely low corporate tax rate um and succeed in in in a form of a tax competition that lowers um lowers revenues for other people whether that should be allowed to persist or not and it does seem a lot more reasonable to suggest that they're at success suggest that there ought to be a floor to the level of corporate taxation um such that you you you uh you uh uh you get away with the problem of what in the united states we would call beggar and i beggar thy neighbor competition well thank you very much now of course we will see whether this minimum rate taxation is introduced and let's see what happens in italy in terms of increasing taxes on the rich and i hope that we can see you soon again in person at the festival here in trenton thank you very much for being with us you