Analysis
Exporting Goods or Exporting Debts?
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- Written by Eurodad
A new report on how export credits - and commercial interests - swell the debt of poor countries.
Endless Poverty is a Human Rights Failure
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- Written by Thomas Pogge
Socioeconomic rights, such as that “to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of oneself and one’s family, including food, clothing, housing, and medical care” (UDHR, Article 25), are currently, and by far, the most frequently unfulfilled human rights. Their widespread under fulfillment also plays a major role in explaining global deficits in civil and political human rights demanding democracy, due process, and the rule of law. Extremely poor people — often physically and mentally stunted due to malnutrition in infancy, illiterate due to lack of schooling, and much preoccupied with their family’s survival — can cause little harm or benefit to the politicians and civil servants who rule them. Such officials therefore pay much less attention to the interests of the poor than to the interests of agents more capable of reciprocation, including foreign governments, companies, and tourists.
Mixed results in Busan
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- Written by Bodo Ellmers-Eurodad
Busan Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation: some progress, no clear commitments, no thanks to EU
The Fourth High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness (HLF4) has come to a close, resulting in the new Busan Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation, which is a mixed bag in terms of the results that civil society was advocating for.
Some progress has been made on the core aid effectiveness agenda, with strengthened commitments on democratic ownership, using country systems and aid untying. Furthermore, China and other BRICs hesitantly moved under the new partnership’s umbrella.
Exposing the lost billions
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- Written by Eurodad
A new and interesting Eurodad report on how transparancy and taxes matter for development.
Social alternatives
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Slowly, progressive social movements start to see the need for concrete social alternatives to the dominant system and for going beyond poverty reduction.
Discourses on debt auditing, on financial transaction taxes, on public banks and/or on alternative currencies, are making their way and are becoming acceptable while maintaining their utopian dimension. This does not mean these ideas are on the verge of being put into practice, but they are ready to be implemented whenever the time is ripe. Because we know that there are alternatives and that another world is possible.
Why not have universal social protection and why not declare poverty illegal?
Who is paying for Jersey to be a tax haven?
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- Written by Richard Murphy
The reason why places like Jersey became tax havens was to raise tax revenue from third parties. The tax revenues raised were, in effect, export earnings that kept their economies afloat.
Deputy Geoff Southern in Jersey has tabled an amendment to the current Jersey budget that shatters the myth that this is still the case. As his amendment says:
The G20s 'convention on fighting tax evasion'
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- Written by Martin Hearson/Action Aid
The G20 announced that they had signed a ‘convention against tax evasion’ that the OECD says could raise £62 billion. The convention, which is not new but rather an update of an existing treaty, is being sold as a part of the G20’s development agenda, as the OECD’s top tax man Jeffrey Owens remarked to the Guardian: “Over the coming months we will be working with developing countries so that they will rapidly be in a position to sign the convention."
A global tax cooperation convention has been a key cornerstone of campaigners’ agenda for the G20 this year. Tax authorities in developing countries need a framework to exchange information on their taxpayers with other countries where those taxpayers have savings or other sources of income – for example if they have money stashed in an offshore account. They also need a legal instrument that allows them to discuss the tax affairs of multinational companies operating in more than one country, as African tax authorities reacting to ActionAid’s report on the beer company SABMiller recently found out.
So are development agencies bouncing up and down with excitement? Well, yes and no. There are three reasons to question whether this convention will be quite as effective as the OECD claims:
We are living on borrowed time ...
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- Written by Civil Society Reflection Group
The civil society Reflection Group on Global Development Perspectives published a statement for the Rio+20 meeting:
... we are already living on borrowed time...
Analysis of European FTT proposal
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- Written by Heikki Patomäki
Heikki Patomäki is Professor, Department of Political and Economic Research, University of Helsinki and Chair of Attac Finland
Introduction
The Commission published its proposal for a Council Directive on a common system of financial transaction tax and amending Directive 2008/7/EC on 28 September 2011 (main document plus 18 impact assessment documents). This is a proposal for the first EU tax ever, not for a global currency or financial transaction tax. The tax base would be very broad, yet it would exclude transactions on primary markets both for securities (shares, bonds) and for currencies (the total turnover on the currency market is roughly four trillion USD per day, out of which 1,5 trillion are spot market transactions). The proposed tax rate is 0,1% for shares and bonds, and 0,01% for derivatives. The estimates about potential revenues are very uncertain, but the FTT could generate, according to the Commission, revenues in the order of 50-100 billion Euros and possibly, with alternative assumptions, much more.
G20 Defers Decision on FTT Despite Global Support
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- Written by Kavaljit Singh
The G20 finance ministers and central bankers have put off an immediate decision to weigh up a global financial transaction tax (FTT) proposal at the forthcoming G20 Summit (Cannes, 3-4 November 2011).
The two-day Ministerial Meeting in Paris took place against the backdrop of huge protests in US and Europe, galvanized by the Occupy Wall Street movement. At the Paris meeting, G20 finance ministers discussed myriad policy and implementation issues concerning world economy and financial markets. As anticipated, eurozone sovereign debt crisis dominated the discussions and the communiqué pressed Europe to act decisively on resolving the crisis at the forthcoming EU summit next week.
Read more: G20 Defers Decision on FTT Despite Global Support
