The European Commission has published a Cross-country Review of Taxes on Wealth and Transfers of Wealth.
The main objective of this report is to provide an overview of current tax practices with regard to personal wealth and wealth transfer in the 28 EU Member States. This overview allows for a comparison of tax provisions across countries which goes beyond the existing tax nomenclature. One of the goals of the report is to provide a typology of countries regarding wealth and wealth transfer taxation.
For this report, three categories of wealth taxes are identified:
- Inheritance and gift taxes (taxes on wealth transfer)
- Real estate and land taxes
- Annually recurring taxes on net-wealth
This report includes, for each Member State, detailed information about the taxes in each of the categories identified above, as well as a description of provisions in non-wealth related taxes related to these categories. Furthermore, for each category the significant developments since the year 2000 are described. All country specific information is included in part II of this report.
22