A helpful analogy to understand how governments view citizens is to think of citizens tax cattle. We are free range, but the end product is tax money for the government.
Through that lens, you can see a great opportunity for governments to target individuals who work online and bring in more tax revenue.
Over the past ten years, there has been massive growth in the number of people that can and do work remotely. Working from home and the digital nomad movement has created a class of location free agents. People who could easily move to a new country while continuing to work the same job and live largely similar lives.
This is a great herd of tax cattle ready to be rounded up by the right government.
This is happening in small steps with some forward-looking countries like Estonia, but the real opportunity exists for a developing country. The presence of a digital workforce in your country not only brings in taxes and development of accommodation and service industries, but it also creates a skill transfer to local people.
If 50,000 digital professionals move into a city, the young people there are going to start asking what is it that those guys are doing that allows them to make money and how can I do it?
The foreign entrepreneurs will hire VA’s and train them up—helping them develop the skills to one day run their own businesses.
All it would take for a country is creating a special type of visa and a low tax residence status. Let anyone come to your country and pay $1000 for an annual visa and 5% income taxes.
That is a far cheaper tax rate than any country where the employees would be coming from but would result in a massive increase in tax revenues for the new country.
The digital professionals get the benefit of lowering their taxes and living in a much more affordable country. The new country gets the benefit of development, jobs, tax revenue, and skill transfer.
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