Episode 02
Your
Tax
What you built should not shrink every year.
The numbers
Your income
60.5%
The world’s highest top rate on income, raised again this year. Several covered countries sit above 50%.
In the UAE
0%
Personal income tax. Unchanged.
What you own
3.5%
Annual wealth tax on assets you already paid tax to build. Inheritance takes up to 55% on top.
In the UAE
None
No wealth tax. No inheritance tax.
Your business
46%
The combined burden of tax and levies on labor in one covered country. Effective 60% bands exist in another.
In the UAE
9%
Corporate tax, and only above a healthy profit threshold. 100% foreign ownership.
Sources: OECD and PwC worldwide tax summaries, national statistics, 2024–2026.
Why this film exists
In episode two, a polite officer cuts a neat square out of something you love, thanks you, and promises to return next year. Nobody in the film raises their voice. That is the joke — and that is the system, described accurately.
Across the nineteen countries we researched, the pattern is not one bad rate but a stack of them: top marginal income rates above fifty and even sixty percent, annual taxes on wealth that was already taxed when it was earned, inheritance rates that take half of what a family built, and thresholds frozen so that every year, quietly, more people slide into the top band. The slice is small each time. It never stops being cut.
The UAE’s answer fits in one line of a table: zero personal income tax, no wealth tax, no inheritance tax, and a nine percent corporate rate that begins only above a healthy threshold. What you built stays the size you built it. That is the whole promise, and it is written in the tax code, not in a slogan.