tax
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 21, 2017
I continue to explore how developing countries go about increasing their tax revenues as a way to escape from poverty, reducing the need for aid and other forms of international co-operation. In jargon, we call these efforts domestic resource mobilisation. This time I have spoken with Huong Nguyen, Non-Executive Director of the Vietnam Initiative Social Enterprise (VNI), a leading Vietnamese think-tank based in the country’s capital, Hanoi...
May 18, 2017
Strengthening a developing country’s finances by increasing its tax revenues, rather than depending exclusively on aid, is widely seen as the way forward in the development community. Yet, few people actually know first-hand what it takes to generate support for increasing tax revenues in a developing country – particularly at community level...