social policies. This however is an area in which the persistence of certain myths often has made a disservice to public debate. One assumption in particular, popularized as the "Kuznets curve", is that the growth of inequality is an inevitable price to pay for economic growth, so that the introduction of policies to combat inequalities, if it occurs too early, might damage the prospects for development.20 However, quite apart from the fact that the original reasoning of Simon Kuznets, which applied to fast-growing nations going through rapid processes of industrialization and urbanization, could not be transposed to advanced industrial economies in which these processes are completed, the ideological uses made of his work does not correspond to the actual findings of Kuznets: whereas there may have been, historically, a correlation between the structural transformation linked to industrialization and the increase of inequality, it does not follow that such increase should be treated as a condition for industrialization -indeed, one may suspect that industrialization would have been far less damaging to social cohesion, and thus far more sustainable, with robust redistributive schemes compensating the losers by transferring resources from the gainers. Nor indeed, do such ideological uses have any (other) solid data to rely on. Quite to the contrary in fact, there is now a consensus that high levels of taxation, allowing the State to adopt robust redistributive policies and provide high-quality public services, far from being an obstacle to economic growth, are an indispensable ingredient thereof: the International Monetary Fund (IMF) found that "the combined direct and indirect effects of redistribution, including the growth effects of the resulting lower inequality, are on average pro-growth".21 Indeed, more recent research has generalized findings initially focused on OECD countries, which concluded that the concentration of incomes at the top impeded growth, whereas growth in contrast was stimulated by increasing the portion of total wealth going to the lowest quintile of the population or to the middle class: researchers from the IMF thus found "an inverse relationship between the income share accruing to the rich (top 20 percent) and economic growth": If the income share of the top 20 percent increases by 1 percentage point, GDP growth is actually 0.08 percentage point lower in the following five years, suggesting that the benefits do not trickle down. Instead, a similar increase in the income share of the bottom 20 percent (the poor) is associated with 0.38 percentage point higher growth. This positive relationship between disposable income shares and higher growth continues to hold for the second and third quintiles (the middle class).22 There is no tradeoff, therefore, between the understandable desire of low-income countries to grow their economy, and the reduction of inequality within these countries by progressive taxation and redistribution schemes. There are therefore strong reasons to define the adoption of strongly progressive taxation schemes as a condition for the realization of economic, social and cultural rights, and thus as a duty for the States parties to the Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Yet, for many governments, progressive taxation with powerful inequality-reducing impacts may be difficult to achieve. Indirect taxes (such as VAT) are easier to collect, and therefore, despite their regressive impacts (since poor households spend a higher proportion of their incomes on buying consumer goods23), they may be the 20 See Simon Kuznets, "Economic Growth and Income Inequality", American Economic Review 45 (March 1955): 1–28. Report of the Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Magdalena Sepulveda Carmona, presented at the 26th session of the Human Rights Council (A/HRC/26/28) (22 May 2014), para. 40, citing Jonathan D. Ostry, Andrew Berg and Charalambos G. Tsangarides, “Redistribution, Inequality and Growth”, IMF Staff Discussion Note, February 2014 (International Monetary Fund, Washington, D.C., 2014). See also Andrew Berg and Jonathan D. Ostry, "Inequality and Unsustainable Growth: Two Sides of the Same Coin?", IMF Staff Discussion Note 11/08 (International Monetary Fund, Washington, D.C., 2011). 22 IMF Staff Discussion Note, Causes and Consequences of Income Inequality: A Global Perspective (Era Dabla-Norris, Kalpana Kochhar, Nujin Suphaphiphat, Frantisek Ricka, Evridiki Tsounta), June 2015, p. 7. 23 Diane Elson, Radhika Balakrishnan and James Heintz, "Public Finance, Maximum Available Resources and Human Rights", in Aiofe Nolan, R. O’Connell & Colin Harvey, Human Rights and Public Finance: Budgets and the Promotion of Economic and Social Rights (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2013), 13-39, at 28; and in the same volume, Ignacio Saiz, "Resourcing Rights: Combating Tax Injustice from a Human Rights Perspective", 77-104, at 84. It is important to note, however, that although VAT taxes are regressive when calculations are made on income (the poorest households contribute more as a proportion of their 21 10 CRIDHO Working Paper 2017/1