The country with the highest global income tax rate is currently Belgium, home to the international headquarters of the European Union and NATO. The current income tax rate there is forty-two percent, based on a single person on an average salary, with no children.

This is according to Statista, a leading global portal for statistics. Following in Belgium’s lead is Germany with an income tax rate of almost forty percent. Denmark rounds off the top three countries with the third highest income tax rate in the world at almost thirty-nine percent.

Where there are high rates of income tax, secret tax jurisdictions become more prevalent. Between twenty-one trillion to thirty-two trillion US dollars is the current estimated value of private financial wealth that resides in these tax havens around the world.

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This equates to anywhere between thirteen trillion and twenty trillion British pounds lying in secret tax jurisdictions untaxed, or lightly taxed.

Nineteen states that appear on the Financial Secrecy Index list are British overseas territories and British Commonwealth territories, however, the United States accounts for more than twenty-two percent of global financial service exports, the largest share. The top three tax havens in the world are Switzerland, Luxembourg and Hong Kong respectively.