The $70 Trillion Hand-Off-Inheritance: Inequality and Imbalance

A hasty inheritance tax without valuation credibility could do more harm than good. The smarter path is to plug leaks, harmonize records, and tax capital consistently across life and death alike.

By P SESH KUMAR

New Delhi, November 9, 2025 — A recent Common Dreams report warns that a looming $70 trillion global inheritance wave will hard-wire inequality, citing a new G20 expert panel led by Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz. The anxiety is real: wealth has clustered at the top and bequests can entrench it.

Yet the article overstates and perhaps flattens a complex story. It treats “inheritance as synonymous with inequality” as a straight line, could gloss over major cross-country differences in how inheritances are taxed (or not), also possibly confuse global totals with national realities, besides underplaying administrative feasibility.

This narrative attempts to examine what the article gets right and wrong, compare its claims with Federal Reserve, OECD, and G20 data, and distil what lessons this global debate could hold for India-where estate duty was abolished in 1985, digitization of asset records is said to be largely complete, yet inequality remains dangerously entrenched.

The global alarm bell-and its echoes

The Common Dreams piece, summarizing a G20 Extraordinary Committee of Independent Experts on Global Inequality, declares that the world is in an “inequality emergency.” Over $70 trillion in global wealth is expected to transfer between generations in the next decade, and $5.2 trillion from about 1,000 billionaires over 30 years, “mostly untaxed.”

The article quotes Stiglitz’s call for a global “IPCC-style” panel on inequality and urges the G20 to tax the super-rich and multinationals more aggressively.

The sense of crisis Is understandable. The G20 report indeed shows that the top 1% captured roughly 41% of new wealth since 2000, while the bottom half gained a mere 1%. The imbalance is shocking, but the article collapses this complex reality into a single villain: inheritance. It ignores how wealth composition, tax architecture, and enforcement capacity vary by country, and treats the $70 trillion figure as a common pool-when in truth it could be a global sum of vastly different systems.

Where the article hits and where it probably misses

The central premise—that inheritances entrench inequality—appears to be statistically supported. In the U.S., Federal Reserve data show the top 1% holds 28–35% of wealth, while the bottom half owns less than 3%. Yet the article’s argument blurs into overstatement on three counts.

First, it declares inheritance “mostly untaxed.” That may be true for many billionaire estates parked in low-tax jurisdictions, but misleading for developed economies. OECD data show that inheritance and estate taxes already raise about 0.5% of total tax revenue across member nations.

The United Kingdom collected nearly £8 billion last year under inheritance tax; Japan and France tax a wider base. In the U.S., estate taxes bring in about 0.1% of GDP, affecting only the richest 0.2% of estates. The problem may not be zero taxation—it is thin bases and thick exemptions.

Second, the global sum could hide national nuance. Bequests are taxed-or not-within sovereign borders. The U.S. exempts large estates; France taxes heirs progressively; emerging economies like India have no estate duty. Aggregating them into a single “$70 trillion mostly untaxed” pool does create a moral headline but an analytical mirage.

Third, the article fails to unpack the type of assets being transferred. Billionaire fortunes are mostly in business equity or private holdings-hard to value and harder to tax without choking enterprise continuity. Middle-class inheritances, in contrast, are in housing or pensions. Taxing both with the same brush breeds political backlash and fiscal inefficiency.

The counter-story: policy plumbing, not moral panic

A sound counter-view is that inheritance taxes are neither panacea nor placebo. OECD and U.S. Congressional Budget Office data show that such taxes have low revenue yield but high symbolic power. They only work when information systems, valuation norms, and anti-avoidance laws are strong. Otherwise, avoidance flourishes and litigation consumes the gains.

Moreover, the inheritance moment is just one piece of the inequality puzzle. Intergenerational mobility research (Chetty et al.) finds that schools, neighbourhoods, and early-life health matter as much as wealth transmission. Taxing bequests without fixing opportunity gaps is like squeezing the balloon-it bulges elsewhere.

Another underplayed dimension is asset-price inflation. The rich got richer in the past decade largely because financial and property markets soared, not simply due to inheritance. Tackling that requires capital-gains reform and wealth transparency, not just moralistic estate levies.

India’s reality: inequality on digital rails

In India, the headline reads differently. Estate duty was scrapped in 1985, and wealth and gift taxes followed suit later. Yet India’s wealth pyramid has tilted steeply since: the top 1% owns nearly 40% of wealth and 23% of income, among the world’s highest. What makes this more complicated is that Indian wealth is illiquid and opaque-about 88–95% is supposed to lie in real estate and gold, not financial assets.

Unlike many developing economies, India has (at least that is what the Government/s would like us to believe) already digitized much of its asset information architecture. The Digital India Land Records Modernization Programme (DILRMP) has computerized ownership and encumbrance data in most states. CERSAI provides a registry of mortgaged assets; MCA-21, PAN-Aadhaar, and GSTN do offer rich financial linkages; and property registrations are e-enabled. The first-generation infrastructure exists. The challenge now is to make these systems talk to each other-securely, legally, and seamlessly.

So, should India bring back an inheritance tax? Not yet. The groundwork—digital records, interoperability, valuation accuracy, and enforcement—must mature before re-imposing such a levy. Otherwise, it risks becoming another porous, litigation-prone experiment.

The real next step: integration, not re-invention

India does not lack databases; it lacks coherence, consistency, and enforceability. The first-generation digital reforms have done their job; now comes the second-generation task-cleaning, linking, and giving legal sanctity to digital ownership data.

The immediate agenda could include:

Interoperability of databases: Link DILRMP, CERSAI, Sub-Registrar, and municipal systems so that ownership, liens, and property transfers can be cross-verified in real time. Digital records exist, but they often don’t sync across institutions.

Unified Asset Information Grid: Build a secure “Asset Graph” integrating property, corporate, and banking registries through PAN-based identifiers. This will allow transparent tracking of intergenerational wealth transfers without introducing a cumbersome estate duty.

Capital-gains taxation at death: Like Canada, India could tax unrealized capital gains above a high threshold when assets change hands, exempting small estates and primary residences. This is cleaner and more enforceable than a traditional estate duty.

Strengthened Beneficial Ownership Disclosure: India’s 2019 rules must be tightened and enforced to cover trusts, shell entities, and layered partnerships through which the ultra-rich often transfer wealth invisibly.

Purpose-linked spending: Any additional revenue from such reforms should be ring-fenced for mobility—enhancing investments-primary education, health, nutrition, and skill-building. Redistribution achieves meaning only when it funds opportunity.

In short, the next frontier is not more digitization—it is validation. India has built the rails; now it must ensure the trains run on time and carry credible data.

Lessons for India from the global debate

The Common Dreams article, though rhetorically charged, serves a useful purpose: it reopens the conversation on dynastic concentration of wealth. But for India, the lesson is to resist moral simplifications and focus on institutional muscle. A hasty inheritance tax without valuation credibility could do more harm than good. The smarter path is to plug leaks, harmonize records, and tax capital consistently across life and death alike.

When that happens, the debate will shift-from taxing death to financing opportunity. India’s equity problem is not a shortage of slogans but a shortage of systems that work. Building those systems, not copying Western fiscal fashions, will decide whether India’s next trillion-dollar inheritance fuels dynasties-or democracies.

(This is an opinion piece, and views expressed are those of the author only)

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