Development Finance & Tax Justice - Archive

This briefing paper looks at the financing for development (FfD) work at the United Nations in 2020, an exceptional year due to outbreak of the global coronavirus crisis in the spring. Following this shock, FfD became a highly relevant issue on the UN agenda. The FfD process as originally scheduled was redesigned, with the FfD Forum originally scheduled for April cut down from four days of face-to-face meetings to a virtual session that lasted for just one hour. An official [...]

By Roberto Bissio

The numbers provided by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) about the assistance contributed by its members to developing countries are “inflated”, include “fictional figures”, suffer from “fundamental flaws of overcounting, incoherence and premature implementation of an unfinished system” and have therefore “become incoherent as a statistical quantity”, argues Simon Scott, former head of the statistical division of the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee (DAC) in an article recently published by the Brookings Institution.

Official Development [...]

New York, 8 July 2019: “The world is off-track to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Most governments have failed to turn the transformational vision of the 2030 Agenda into real transformational policies. Even worse, xenophobia and authoritarianism are on the rise in a growing number of countries.”

“The implementation of the 2030 Agenda is not just a matter of better policies. It requires more holistic and more sweeping shifts in how power is vested, including through institutional and governance [...]

To coincide with the World Health Summit and the Grand Challenges Conference of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in Berlin, Global Policy Forum, Brot fuer die Welt, medico international, and MISEREOR invite you to discuss the benefits, risks and side-effects of the WHO’s engagement with philanthropic foundations, and reflect on how the WHO can be strengthened in order to fulfill its responsibilities. Speakers will include representatives from the German Ministry of Health, the WHO (tbc) and international civil society.

by Jesse Griffiths

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are ambitious objectives: not only do they call for an end to poverty and hunger, they also recognise the need to fight inequality, including gender inequality, protect the environment, provide decent work, ensure sustainable consumption and production and achieve global peace. Unlike the Millennium Development Goals that preceded them, they apply equally to all nations.

It is already clear that we are not on track to meet the SDGs. For example, though [...]

The United Nations face a funding dilemma. On the one hand, member states continue to transfer new responsibilities to the UN system, not least in implementing the 2030 Agenda and their Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs); on the other hand, they do not match these mandates with adequate resources.

Some see the way out of this financial mess in reinforced UN partnerships with private donors and their foundations. The UN Foundation (UNF) plays a special role here. It was established by [...]

A new briefing from Eurodad reveals how the increased promotion of public-private partnerships (PPPs) by the World Bank and others is having a disastrous impact on both developed and developing countries. From the hospital in Lesotho which has swallowed up a quarter of the country's health budget, to the motorways which nearly bankrupted the Portuguese government - we expose how PPPs are enriching the already wealthy whilst ripping off citizens.

European governments and the European Commission have been increasingly supporting a greater role for the private sector in their development cooperation. With new EU policies and instruments such as the European External Investment Plan, it was deemed important for CONCORD members to agree on a common position, common messages and priorities regarding the role of the private sector in contributing to sustainable development. To write this paper, CONCORD Europe's specific work stream on the private sector collaborated with all of [...]

The ECOSOC Forum on Financing for Development (FfD Forum) met four days at the UN headquarters in New York to review the promises made at the Addis Ababa Action Agenda and its predecessors (the 2002 Monterrey Consensus and the 2008 Doha Declaration on Financing for Development). The FdD Forum is also the place for diplomats to discuss the means of implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, but civil society is disappointed by the scarce results and the excessive [...]

The ECOSOC Forum on Financing for Development (FfD Forum) is dedicated to reviewing not only the fulfillment of the Addis Ababa Action Agenda and its predecessors (the 2002 Monterrey Consensus and the 2008 Doha Declaration on Financing for Development), but also the means of implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and feeding its results into the annual High-level Political Forum on Sustainable Development (HLPF).

During negotiation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, as well as the various [...]

The central substantive piece during the preparations for the 2017 FfD Forum has been the work of the Inter-Agency Task Force (IATF) and its report “Progress and prospects”.  However, during open briefings from the IATF on the report, Member States – mostly members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) – expressed frustration, wanting to understand the division of responsibilities among Task Force members in report preparations. They referenced the mandate of the IATF [...]

By Sarah Dayringer and Karen Judd

The United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres challenged participants at the 61st Commission on the Status of Women (CSW 61) in March 2017: “Do not let us at the UN off the hook. Keep our feet to the fire.” Many civil society organizations (CSOs) are doing just that –  calling for more from the CSW.

At CSW 61, Dalia Leinarte, Chair of the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) said, “[l]inking the [...]

The second FfD Forum will be convened by the President of ECOSOC from 22 to 25 May 2017 at the United Nations Headquarters in New York.

Building on the inaugural FfD Forum, which devoted particular attention to setting up the monitoring framework for the follow-up to the Addis Ababa Action Agenda (Addis Agenda), the 2017 Forum is expected to provide impetus for the implementation of FfD outcomes and the delivery of means of implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable [...]

UN expert body takes new steps to prevent corporate tax abuses, but more is needed to ensure companies pay their fair share and stop depleting the resources needed to realize human rights.

This paper explores some of the links between tax- and gender justice at the global level by highlighting two central ways in which illicit financial flows and gender injustice are connected. First, through the effects of tax evasion and avoidance and secondly, through the role of financial secrecy jurisdictions and global networks of facilitators which enable illicit financial flows which result from trafficking in women. The paper argues that confronting and dismantling the global enablers and secrecy jurisdictions will be [...]

2016 marks the first year after the adoption of three major international outcome documents including the the Addis Ababa Action Agenda. To implement these decisions, all countries will need to step up the mobilization of domestic resources and increase international cooperation. One of the decisions of the 3rd FfD-Conference was to strengthen the work of the UN Committee of Experts on International Cooperation in Tax Matters (UNTC). At our side-event, we want to learn from experts and discuss where the [...]

The importance of global cooperation on tax issues is becoming more and more evident. The sums lost amount to hundreds of billions annually. While steps to curb the losses are underway, gaps in global tax governance remain both in the institutional setting and with regard to substantive issues. For example, there is still no body with universal membership that could discuss issues that are of particular importance to countries in the Global South. In order to fill these gaps, either [...]

There is a growing global consensus that the secrecy-havens—jurisdictions which undermine global standards for corporate and financial transparency—pose a global problem: they facilitate both money laundering and tax avoidance and evasion, contributing to crime and unacceptably high levels of global wealth inequality.

As economic leaders, the United States and Europe have an obligation to force financial centers to comply with global transparency standards. That they have the instruments to do so has been forcefully shown in the fight against terrorism [...]

A report published today by the Greens/EFA group in the European Parliament reveals how the German chemical multinational BASF has been avoiding paying taxes in the European Union on a grand scale for years. The company BASF makes targeted use of tax advantages in individual countries, and particularly benefits from tax havens such as Belgium, Malta and the Netherlands. Between 2010 and 2014, BASF henceforth, saved a total of almost one billion euros in taxes. Belgium allows the deduction of [...]

Switzerland—arguably the world's leading tax haven—faced tough questions from a UN human rights body in Geneva today over the toll that its tax and financial secrecy policies take on women's rights across the globe. Prompted by a submission from CESR, Alliance Sud, the Global Justice Clinic at NYU School of Law, Public Eye and the Tax Justice Network, the UN Committee mandated to oversee compliance with the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) probed [...]

Taxation of multinational corporations is of utmost importance to developing countries, which on average generate around 10% of government revenues from this source. However, there are clear indications that the current international system is not working. One type of tax avoidance alone is currently costing developing countries between $70 billion and $120 billion per year. While often considered highly immoral, such international tax avoidance is often, technically speaking, legal. One of the solutions proposed to developing countries to increase their [...]

This year’s Annual Meeting of the IMF and World Bank took place against the backdrop of continued sluggish growth in developed and developing countries alike. The impact of the commodity price crash weighs heavily on many developing countries and has caused a significant fall in global trade. While the IMF warns that both private and public debt levels remain dangerously high, that the anticipated deleveraging did not happen, the main response of the Bretton Woods Institutions (BWIs) is new lending [...]

By Aldo Caliari

Due to UNCTAD’s decidedly pro-South and uncompromising development-focused mission, its quadrennial conferences have traditionally been North –South showdowns. Coming a few months after the adoption of the ambitious and universal 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its 17 associated goals, the theme of the XIV Quadrennial Conference of UNCTAD (the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development) was “From Decisions to Actions.” There was, therefore, reason to expect that this time members would bridge their differences for [...]

In July 2015, the international community will have the chance to change the future of finance development. Governments, civil society, trade unions and other actors will meet for the third UN conference on Financing for Development (Ffd) in Addis Ababa (Ethiopia) to take concrete decisions for the future of development and how to finance it. In the run-up to this crucial meeting, two major reports have been released which are intended to inform the upcoming debates: one from the Intergovernmental [...]

Maximum Available Resources, Non-retrogressoin and Minimum Essential Levels in Tax Policy” is the second in a series of advocacy tools on human rights and tax policy produced by the RightingFinance Initiative. The series aims to assist education and dissemination of standards on tax policy and human rights contained in a report produced by the UN Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights. Drawing on that report, this second publication lays out the normative foundations for maximum available resources, non-retrogression [...]