OECD
January 22, 2024
A few months ago, I interviewed Abdul Muheet Chowdhary from the South Centre to discuss the ongoing negotiations on a landmark United Nations tax agreement that is in the making. If approved by enough Member States, this global agreement – also called the UN Framework Convention on International Tax Cooperation, or UN Tax Convention in short – will have the potential to shift the decision-making power on international tax rules from the OECD, a rich country club, to the UN. This move will give all countries, especially those in the Global South, a fairer share of tax revenues from multinational corporations operating within their borders. I spoke with Abdul again in December, days after the UN General Assembly had finally agreed to proceed with the drafting of the convention, to ask him what we should expect in the next few months.
August 7, 2023
Civil society estimates that every year, USD 312 billion are lost in unpaid corporate taxes around the world. By using legal loopholes, many companies avoid paying their dues – often to Southern countries that host their operations and provide cheap labour. This happens because the governments of those countries are unable to enforce their fiscal policies, and there is still no global tax agreement to protect their interests.
But something is about to change...
June 16, 2018
This year marks my twentieth anniversary of working in the humanitarian and development sector. One of the issues I grapple most with these days is whether international aid is still, fundamentally, a Western construct based on assumptions that are no longer relevant, or if it is a universal form of assistance that takes different shapes depending on the region of the world we work in. In particular, if international cooperation is truly universal, is it paying more attention to what Southern citizens and the people directly affected by a crisis think of the aid they receive across the board, or is citizen engagement just another Western trend?