According to an Oxfam research, between 2022 and 2024, India received the most regressive tax recommendations from the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
The report, which was made public ahead of the World Bank and IMF spring meetings in Washington, has pointed out that the international organization is using a "double standard" by recommending regressive policies that are "likely to exacerbate inequality" for wealthy nations while offering primarily progressive recommendations to others.
According to the research, 52% of the IMF's tax suggestions for high-income nations were progressive, while 59% of its recommendations for low- and lower-middle-income countries were regressive.

Only thirty, or about three percent, of the 1,049 tax recommendations that the IMF gave to 125 countries between 2022 and 2024 addressed net wealth taxes and the taxation of income from wealth, namely capital gains, according to Oxfam's analysis.
According to the research, billionaire wealth has increased by 81% since 2020, notwithstanding the tremendous expansion of extreme wealth.
According to the data, the IMF gave the most progressive tax advise to the United States and Brazil. More progressive proposals were also given to China, Kazakhstan, Angola, Botswana, Canada, Australia, France, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Sweden, and Norway."While high-income countries generally receive IMF recommendations that are tilted towards progressive measures, amounting to 52 per cent of the overall total classifiable advice to these countries, poorer countries don't seem to get the same treatment," the research stated.
However, India and a handful of other Global South nations earned the most regressive suggestions.Due to the regressive nature of the IMF's tax recommendations for Global South nations, the majority of these policies are likely to worsen inequality by burdening middle-class and lower-class citizens with the majority of the tax burden while sparing the wealthiest.

The IMF proposed policies that could disproportionately impact low- and middle-income groups in Chile, Nigeria, and Hungary, according to the report.
The IMF recommended increasing tax rates for low- and middle-income groups while keeping rates on the highest income bands unchanged in Chile, a country with one of the worst levels of economic disparity.
It recommended raising value-added tax in Nigeria, where roughly one-third of people live in poverty—the highest proportion in Africa—while advising against a windfall profit tax on energy corporations in Hungary.Those with greater wealth and income are guaranteed to pay proportionately more taxes than those with less under a progressive tax system.Rarely were progressive tax policies like net wealth and capital gains taxes suggested, and when they were, the recommendations were focused on high-income situations, according to the research.
A number of national situations with troubling tax policy recommendations were also mentioned in the report. The IMF warned that New Zealand's corporate income tax is "relatively high compared to peer advanced economies" and recommended that the government cut it.
It suggested "lowering taxes on deferred capital gains" in Sweden in order to correct housing market inefficiencies. In Cote d'Ivoire, or the Ivory Coast, the IMF suggested doing away with VAT exclusions and implementing statutory VAT rates, while in the Philippines, it called for expanding the value-added tax base by rationalising exemptions.

According to Oxfam, the IMF officially admits that tax policy is a crucial instrument for combating inequality, but it connects its tax recommendations to inequality much more frequently for high-income nations (34%) than for low- and lower-middle-income nations (8%). There is medium or high inequality in about 90% of low- and lower-middle-income nations.
The head of Oxfam International's Washington office, Kate Donald, claimed that the IMF was using a "double standard" by giving wealthy nations mostly progressive advice while still advocating for regressive policies elsewhere.The IMF is acting with a concerning double standard that raises concerns about the impartiality it considers to be a fundamental value.According to Oxfam's analysis, gender inequality was mentioned in just 10% of the IMF's suggested tax measures, and the majority of those mentions were limited to a few phrases. According to the IMF, modifying current policies accounted for more than 90% of its tax recommendations.
Oxfam called on the IMF to "systematically place inequality at the heart of all fiscal advice" in order to improve the progressivity of national tax systems through revenue-raising measures.
It stated that excessive dependence on consumption taxes and other regressive policies that disproportionately affect low-income households should be discouraged by the fund.In order to ensure that recommendations do not worsen inequality, the organization also urged the IMF to "conduct and publish rigorous distributional impact assessments" of all tax and fiscal advice in its Article IV reports, which are the IMF's typically yearly evaluations of member nations' economies and policies.
Oxfam also encouraged the IMF to actively promote policies aimed at preventing corporate tax evasion and unfair competition, while also greatly expanding its suggestions for taxing wealth and high-net-worth individuals.
Additionally, it requested that the Fund create a "centralised, user-friendly database" to monitor and disseminate the tax guidance offered in Article IV reports.