This paper analyses the European Commission's assessment of investment needs as implied by the EU's Paris commitment. We find that official estimates of the green investment gap until 2050 are likely to seriously understate actual investment required. Against this backdrop, we assess the potential of a European wealth tax to close this investment gap. In doing so, we first provide a detailed estimate of the wealth distribution across 22 EU member countries and then develop a microsimulation model for recurring wealth taxes in these countries. The model is based on household survey data from the HFCS, but compensates for missing observations at the top of the wealth distribution by means of a Pareto model. Taking different tax designs into account, we generally find a substantial revenue potential that could contribute significantly to closing currently existing green investment gaps. We also find that compensating for the ‘missing rich’ is essential for sensibly evaluating progressive tax designs.

本文分析了欧盟委员会对欧盟巴黎承诺所暗示的投资需求的评估。我们发现，官方对 2050 年绿色投资缺口的估计可能严重低估了所需的实际投资。在此背景下，我们评估了欧洲财富税缩小这一投资缺口的潜力。为此，我们首先对 22 个欧盟成员国的财富分配进行了详细估计，然后为这些国家的经常性财富税开发了一个微观模拟模型。该模型基于来自 HFCS 的家庭调查数据，但通过帕累托模型弥补了财富分配顶部缺失的观察结果。考虑到不同的税收设计，我们通常会发现巨大的收入潜力，可以为缩小目前存在的绿色投资缺口做出重大贡献。我们还发现，补偿“失踪的富人”对于明智地评估累进税设计至关重要。