Development Finance & Tax Justice - Archive

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.

Today the OECD presented its report on a new global standard for countries and tax havens to exchange information with each other, a new tool for fighting the scourge of tax evasion. The report contains many positive elements but falls far short of what the world’s citizens desperately need – especially citizens in poorer countries.

In this second of a two part series on the International Monetary Fund (IMF) Discussion Note on 'Macroeconomic Gains From Gender Equity' feminist economists Prof. Stephanie Seguino with Associate Prof. Elissa Braunstein and Dr. Anit N. Mukherjee take a look at the some of the shortfalls in the report related to gender wage gap, how macroeconomic policies perpetuate gender inequality, female labour force participation rate and unpaid care work.

A new working paper by Global Policy Forum, MISEREOR and Brot für die Welt sheds light on how greater corporate transparency can help overcome the dependence by countries in the Global South on foreign donors and mobilize sufficient government revenue to provide an adequate level of public goods. Corporations have devised various ways of getting their money out of a country without paying tax. If transnational companies are to be more honest in their tax affairs, their payment flows must [...]

The International Budget Partnership (IBP) has launched a special issue of its newsletter that focuses on budgeting for environmental sustainability. In his contribution, Jens Martens, Director of the Global Policy Forum lines out the idea of 'Sustainable Development Budgets' and their key role as an integral part of the post-2015 agenda. Moreover articles include examples of what countries are doing to “green” their budgets in Philippines and Canada and what shall be done about environmentally harmful subsidies.

Close relatives of China’s top leaders have held secretive offshore companies in tax havens that helped shroud the Communist Party elite’s wealth, a leaked cache of documents reveals. The confidential files include details of a real estate company co-owned by current President Xi Jinping’s brother-in-law and British Virgin Islands companies set up by former Premier Wen Jiabao’s son and also by his son-in-law.

A new report by Eurodad's Stéphanie Colin deal with the issue of concessional loans in development finance. In the context of tighter budgets in OECD-DAC countries governments are looking for methods to increase official development assitance (ODA) levels without budgetary implications. One way of doing this is reporting a larger share of loans to developing countries as ODA. Other measures in this directions are ideas to leverage development resources by 'blending' public with private funds. The report discusses the main [...]

Crime, corruption, and tax evasion drained US$946.7 billion from the developing world in 2011, up more than 13.7 percent from 2010. These findings by Washington based Think Tank Global Financial Integrity, which peg cumulative illicit financial outflows from developing countries at US$5.9 trillion between 2002 and 2011 are part of a new study. "As the world economy sputters along in the wake of the global financial crisis, the illicit underworld is thriving – siphoning more and more money from developing [...]

European leaders should use their meeting this week to agree further action against tax dodging by multinationals, CSOs urge in a new report. The report: ‘Giving with one hand and taking with the other: Europe’s role in tax-related capital flight from developing countries 2013’ reveals the state of money laundering, tax avoidance and tax evasion, and the extent of government action against them, across 13 EU Countries.

GENEVA (2 December 2013) – The United Nations Special Rapporteur on the right to food, Olivier De Schutter, today called for developing countries to be granted the freedom to use food reserves to help secure the right to food, without the threat of sanctions under current World Trade Organization (WTO) rules.

Mr. De Schutter’s call comes on the eve of a high-level WTO summit in Bali, Indonesia, (3-6 December) which will try to reach agreement on proposals on developing countries’ [...]

On November 21st the sixth meeting of the OECD Global Forum on Transparency and Exchange of Information for Tax Purposes is opened in Jakarta. On this occasion, a broad coalition of organizations, including GPF, has issued a position paper on Automatic Information Exchange (AIE) for tax purposses. If a person or entity resident in one jurisdiction owns income-generating assets in another jurisdiction, the resident's tax authorities generally need to know about that asset or income, to assess their tax liabities [...]

by Mark Herkenrath

At the St. Petersburg G20 Summit, the leading industrialized and emerging countries again came out clearly for automatic tax information exchange. They want to see it implemented by the end of 2015 at the latest. The OECD was tasked with working out a framework agreement by next February and quickly completing work on the requisite technical infrastructure.

Moreover, the G20 Heads of State promised in their final declaration also to allow developing countries access to automatic information [...]

The tax structure and the level of revenue collection, budget allocations and expenditure influence the ability of governments to fulfill their human rights obligations and tackle discrimination and structural inequalities. The UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Magdalena Sepúlveda Carmona, is preparing to submit a report concerning fiscal and tax policy, poverty and human rights. Governments have been asked to respond the questionnaire prepared by the Special Rapporteur in order to gather information on domestic fiscal and [...]

‘Blending’ is a mechanism that links a grant element, provided by official development assistance (ODA), with loans from publicly owned institutions or commercial lenders. This is not a new phenomenon. What is new is the narrative of the European Union (EU), which argues that using ODA to leverage private finance is the solution following the financial crisis. There has been an increase in development finance institutions (DFIs) and EU donors using blending mechanisms to increase support and lending to private [...]

TJN’s 2013 Financial Secrecy Index exposes yawning gap between G20 rhetoric and reality

Today the Tax Justice Network launches its 2013 Financial Secrecy Index, the biggest ever survey of global financial secrecy. This unique index combines a secrecy score with a weighting to create a ranking of the countries that most actively and aggressively promote secrecy in global finance.

This new edition of the Financial Secrecy Index shows that the United Kingdom is the most important global player in the [...]

The United Nations' Sixth High-Level Dialogue on Financing for Development (FfD) that took place in New York in early October shows a deep rift between developing and developed countries. This dialogue was mandated to look at the FfD Agenda's status of implementation and the tasks ahead. While the EU thinks it contributed at least its fair share, developing countries pointed to the major failures in implementation of aid, debt or trade commitments. The future of the FfD process remains unclear [...]

The Working Group on "Financing for sustainable development" of the socalled UN System Task Team (UNTT) has issued four background papers for the Intergovernmental Expert Committee on Sustainable Development Financing and its deliberations surrounding the post-2015 UN development agenda. Paper #1 reviews investment requirement estimates that have been published over the last decade for nine sectors; paper #2 takes stock of national, regional and international public sources for sustainable development finance; paper #3 examines the challenges in raising private sector [...]

Briones2011Prof. Leonor Magtolis-Briones from Social Watch Philippines gives three reasons why the Philippines 2014 national budget is prone to misuse. Social Watch Philippines analyses the government’s annual spending budgets and releases alternative budgets through its Alternative Budget Initiative to influence the national budgets to become more supportive in creating a sustainable environment and more equitable society for the Philippines. The following is an edited version of a piece originally entitled Speaking for Myself: The 2014 National Budget, Special Purpose Funds [...]

In a feature South-African organization L4BB deals with the subject of growing anger at corporate tax dodging. Adrienne Margolis poses the question: How can commercial lawyers respond to demands for tax justice? In order to improve revenue raising from multinationals operating in developing countries, L4BB demands a legal aprroach that sidesteps technical distinctions between legitimate tax planning, tax avoidance and tax evasion and focuses instead on a more widely defined notion of 'tax abuse'