Articles
Will reporting rule changes agreed by OECD committee undermine the credibility of aid?
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Ministers and senior officials of developed countries agreed major changes today to what can be counted as Official Development Assistance (ODA, or ‘aid’), opening the door for greater use of aid to subsidise private companies. A push by some states for greater aid spending on military and security costs was partly rebuffed, after strong campaigning from civil society organisations, while discussions on how to reduce the huge amount of foreign aid being diverted to cover spending in donor countries to support refugees will culminate later this year.
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Globalizing the struggle is not just a slogan, it is a political strategy
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From February 21st-25th, La Via Campesina is holding its Midterm Conference, including the Women’s Assembly and the Youth Assembly, near Seferihizar in Turkey. Midterm Conferences are held between two and three years after the International Conferences and are the occasion for evaluating work and for following up on the actions and commitments that were decided upon at the preceding International Conference. The last International Conference took place in Jakarta, Indonesia, in 2013. It is expected that more than 100 women and men representatives of peasants and small-scale farmers organisations from all over the world will take part in this Midterm Conference.
Read more: Globalizing the struggle is not just a slogan, it is a political strategy
World Bank compares African staff to animal in official report
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Imagine the third largest employer in the nation's capital characterizing one of its African employees as an animal in an official report. His lawyer, Peter C. Hansen, demanded the "shameful" report that contained "the most galling... overtly racist... anti-African stereotypes" be removed from the record. The organization not only rejected the request, but its Administrative Tribunal felt obliged to let the lawyer know that the "tone and confrontational nature" of his pleadings did not go unnoticed.
The organization terminated the African and made it clear that he could have avoided termination “if [he] had spent a little bit more time and energy listening to his manager and co-workers, and a little bit less energy preparing his case with his attorney." This is not a tale of bygone years, but a case from November 2015.
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Action Aid : 'Mistreated'
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The ‘Mistreated’ report is based on research that has for the first time examined more than 500 international tax treaties that low and lower-middle income countries in Eastern and Southern Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa have signed from 1970 until 2014.
We commissioned research scoring how much a tax treaty restricts the way that the lower income country can levy profit tax, withholding tax and other taxing rights including capital gains tax.
Tackling Inequality around the World
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The widening rich-poor gap is recognised as a major social and political problem, but what measures can be taken nationally and internationally to address this issue?
Economic inequality is now identified as one of the biggest challenges of our time.
Last week, the United States’ presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, a rank outsider just a few months ago, won the Democratic primary in New Hampshire by a landslide against Hillary Clinton, with a campaign theme of fighting inequality.
How do we tackle this seemingly intractable and growing problem?
