This is why Meloni rules out targeting wealthy Italians

Italy's longest-running TV quiz show, offering big cash prizes, is called “The Inheritance” — a choice of title that may reflect how many Italians see a legacy as the ideal route to money, and explain why Rome taxes such gifts so lightly.

- Giuseppe Fonte and Gavin Jones, Reuters

Giorgia Meloni

Yet raising Italy's inheritance tax levels closer to those of most of its peers could help ease the economic and social problems of the European Union's third-largest — but most chronically sluggish — economy, analysts say. Inherited wealth in Italy amounted to some 243 billion euros ($282 billion) in 2024, or 148 of national output, according to a study by economists Salvatore Morelli and Demetrio Guzzardi based on data from New York’s Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality.

The ratio has doubled in 30 years and is the highest since the late 19th century, said Giacomo Gabbuti, an economic historian at Pisa’s Sant’Anna University.

While Italy's level is particularly elevated, the trend is common to many advanced economies as the value of assets accumulated by postwar “baby boomers” has surged. However, handed-down wealth in Italy is taxed at an average rate of below 0.5%, a third of the global average, with the heirs of large fortunes getting particularly light treatment.