Development Finance & Tax Justice - Archive

by Bodo Ellmers

Legitimacy and impartiality in focus

The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) is about to deliver a concept for a new debt workout mechanism. The concept has been developed by a multi-stakeholder expert group that has been convened regularly by UNCTAD since early 2013. Thanks to this new concept, the UN system is finally promising to deliver what developing countries have been calling for since the 1971 Action Programme of Lima – namely, orderly [...]

International development policy is at a crossroads. By September 2015, governments plan to adopt a Post-2015 Development Agenda – an agenda that is supposed to shape the fundamental priorities, goals and strategies for development policy beyond 2015. In parallel, governments have agreed to develop a set of Sustainable Development Goals integrating all dimensions (social, economic and environmental) of sustainable development and being applicable to all countries in the world. Forming one coherent Post-2015 Agenda, including the SDGs, affects all policy [...]

The latest report of the British NGO Christian Aid “Taxing Men and Women: why gender is crucial for a fair tax system” deals with the different effects of tax systems in men and women as well as possibilities how prudent fiscal and tax policy can contribute to gender equality. Whereas a lot of literature exists on the consideration of gender aspects on the spending side of national budgets, this report marks a first step to analyze state revenues with regard [...]

Yesterday, a broad alliance of civil society organizations including Global Policy Forum sent an open letter to the European Commission to protest against the assessment of country by country reporting by PricewaterhouseCoopers. Since PricewaterhauseCoopers - one of the "Big Four" audit firms - is a known opponent of public country by country reporting, letting them assess this crucial tool for preventing corporate tax dodging would be the same logic as to set the fox to guard the henhouse.

During the current session of the UN Human Rights Council the Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Philip Alston, presented a report by his predecessor Magdalena Sepúlveda Carmona concerning fiscal and tax policy, poverty and human rights. The report stresses the role of fiscal and taxation policy as a major determinant in the enjoyment of human rights and makes some reccommendations how to make the global tax system more effective, equitable and transparent.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) yesterday released a new policy paper “Spillovers in International Corporate Taxation”. The paper analyses the effects tax rules can have on other countries' tax systems. These spillovers can result in significant tax losses for developing countries and thereby diminish their ability to realize human rights. The current global tax system allows transnational corporations to reduce their global corporate taxes to almost zero, according to the report. By highlighting the severe shortcomings of the institutional framework [...]

Aldo Caliari, Director of the Rethinking Bretton Woods Project, argues in an article published by the United Nations Non-Governmental Liaison Service (UN-NGLS) that financial and monetary reform should be a fundamental part of post-2015 development agenda. Taking this into consideration, the new agenda was a political opportunity to avoid following the imperfect path of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and to include necessary means of implementation. On top of that, Caliari presents thoughts on key areas like financial regulations and [...]

The World Bank recently initiated a revision of its annual Doing Business Report by an Independent Panel of experts. Civil society criticizes the Doing Business Report for putting business interests ahead of human rights by one-sidedly promoting deregulatory policies. E.g. the International Trade Union Congress (ITUC) found that countries that fail to respect workers’ rights are praised by the report. In fact, the Independent Panel made some recommendations to address the shortcomings of Doing Business. Nevertheless, they seem to be [...]

Eurodad in collaboration with the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung published a report summarizing a conference on alternative solutions to the debt crisis in Europe. Though increasingly questioned by economists, civil society and politicians, austerity policies still form the main instrument to rescue and restart European economies. The conference aimed at developing more equitable and just solutions to the crisis. Experts from Europe, the Middle East and North Africa as well as Latin America contributed and thus enabled the participants to share experiences also [...]

„Secrecy is not the exception but the norm […]” is the major finding of a report published by Christian Aid analyzing the disclosure of economic and financial information of almost 30,000 subsidiaries of the 100 largest companies whose shares are traded on the London Stock Exchange (the FTSE100). More than 90% of these subsidiaries are based in secrecy jurisdictions, only a quarter of them fully reveal information on turnover, assets, shareholder funds and number of employees. Data that is vital [...]

Global Financial Integrity published a report funded by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark analyzing the impact of trade misinvoicing on Ghana, Kenya, Mozambique, Tanzania, and Uganda. According to the report, under- and over-invoicing of trade transactions in the period between 2002 and 2011 caused a loss of US$ 14.39 billions in tax revenues in the five Sub-Saharan African countries. This means that governments lose a huge amount of their annual budget which could otherwise be spend on education [...]

A new report by Tax Justice Network-Africa and Christian Aid asks who benefits after a decade of economic growth in Sub-Saharan Africa. Despite increasing economic prosperity and some positive achievements in poverty reduction too many Sub-Sahara African countries undergo sharp rising income inequality. The report examines eight countries and whether they experiences rising inequalities. By looking at this, the researchers underline the primary importance of the relationship between national tax systems and international taxation issues in redistributing wealth. It is [...]

As the negotiation of the post-2015 development agenda further evolves from broad ideas to more and more specific targets, the question of how to sufficiently finance sustainable development becomes increasingly important. Prior to the 11th session of the Open Working Group (OWG) on Sustainable Development Goals between May 5 and May 9 organizations Center for Economic and Social Rights (CESR) and Christian Aid published a policy briefing tackling exactly this issue. In order to ensure sufficient, equitable and accountable financing [...]

At the Special High-Level Meeting of the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), held in New York on April 14-15, 2014, governments disscussed about features of new development goals which will replace the Millennium Development Goals in 2015. Commitments to financing the new goals are expected to play an important role in those negotiations. In this regard, human rights organizations argue that human rights should inform commitments to finance the new development agenda.

New report on "Financing for Development Post-2015: Improving the Contribution of Private Finance" commissioned by the European Parliament's Committee on Development and co-written by Eurodad, Development Finance International, A&J Communication Development Consultants and Development Initiatives finds that global public finance cannot be directly substituted by private finance, as it pays for public goods, is more predictable and counter-cyclical, and can be targeted at the poorest countries. Global private finance mainly goes to higher income countries and has difficultly targeting MSMEs [...]

Civil Society Organisations participating in an outreach event of the UN Intergovernmental Committee of Experts on Sustainable Development Financing on “Co-Creating New Partnerships for Financing Sustainable Development” in Helsinki issued a statement on what they perceive as key elements of the experts committee's work. The CSOs underline that there is “need to act now. […] To put the world on track for a sustainable future, all actors have to contribute to sustainable development. We need financing of good quality and [...]

A recently published book adds further insights into the political economy of offshore jurisdictions. It raises questions about why offshore has been off-limits for serious political discussion for so many decades. What is the importance of the offshore economy? Is online Gambling a Game Changer to Money Laundering? What is the rationale behind the Secrecy Index of Tax Justice Network? How does Automatic Tax Information Exchange work? Is Austria a tax haven? With which ideology and with which narratives was [...]

On April 3-4, 2014 the Intergovernmental Committee of Experts on Sustainable Development Financing holds a consultation on "Co-Creating New Partnerships for Financing Sustainable Development" in Helsinki, Finland. This committee was established by the outcome document of the Rio+20 conference, which called for committee of experts tasked with preparing a report "proposing options on an effective sustainable development financing strategy to facilitate the mobilization of resources and their effective use in achieving sustainable development objectives". In a statement for the occasion [...]

The Tax Justice Network has released its latest newsletter - this time a special edition on Country by Country reporting edited by Richard Murphy, whom you might call the godfather of this accounting idea. He has brought together different authors from the OECD, the Confederation of British Industry, from Global Witness and Eurodad. Together they present a unique picture of the current state of the campaign for country-by-country reporting throughout the world.

The Arab NGO Network for Development, in collaboration with the Egyptian Center for Economic and Social Rights and the New America’s Middle East Task Force, recently conducted a study of IMF recommendations to Arab governments, particularly those pertaining to austerity measures and subsidy regimes. The report is based on systematic reviews of IMF staff reports on transitioning Arab countries – Tunisia, Morocco, Jordan, Yemen and Egypt – and consultations with regionally-based civil society organizations and thought leaders.

Since the economic crisis hit Europe, international investors have begun suing EU countries struggling under austerity and recession for a loss of expected profits, using international trade and investment agreements. This is revealed by a new report released today by the Transnational Institute and Corporate Europe Observatory. The investors – and the lawyers involved – are scavenging for profits amidst crisis-hit nations, providing a salutary warning of the potential high costsof the proposed trade deal between the US and the [...]

The OECD has published a report on a new global standard for countries and tax havens to exchange information with each other: a crucial tool for tackling offshore secrecy and tax evasion. The report represents significant progress by endorsing a principle that civil society organisations have been demanding for many years, and which has now been endorsed by the G20 finance ministers. In reaction to the report by the OECD, Tax Justice Network (TJN) publishes an analytic response on whether [...]

As the lion’s share of the world’s nations suffer from austerity policies, politicians, financial experts and civil society activists came together this month for a three-day international conference to discuss alternative ways of tackling the debt crisis. Themes included debt restructuring options for countries suffering from high debt burdens, the value of carrying out debt audits to help identify and repudiate illegitimate debt, the problems caused by the tight mandates of central banks, and options how to bring interest rates [...]

Last weekend's G20 finance ministers’ meeting produced an eye-catching (but detail-free) promise to raise global growth levels, but obscured the fact that little concrete progress has been made, with IMF reform mired in US inaction, no proposals for systemic reforms such as debt workout mechanisms, and a reliance for implementation on international institutions such as the OECD that exclude developing country participation.

MPs of the European Parliament from the Economic and Monetary Affairs (ECON) and Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (LIBE) Committees voted in favour of public registries which would provide information on the real, or ‘beneficial’, owners of companies. The long-awaited vote, which recommends significant improvements to the EU’s Anti-Money Laundering Directive (AMLD) and would make it much harder for criminals to launder their money using European companies.