8 March - Women's day

Read this most important report

An amazing article on income inequality ... !

Interview with Emmanuel Saez, famous for working with Thomas Piketty on top incomes:

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A Second edition of a booklet as relevant as ever!

Read it!

Alvin Mosiama, director of Tax Justice Network Africa, and a Task Force regional representative, has as much experience as anyone in campaigning on taxes and transparency for developing countries. In a great op-ed for Devex that everyone should read, he outlines how corporations aren’t just shifting profits to tax havens, but simultaneously shifting the burden of funding the government to those that can least afford it.

Mosiama writes,

An emerging new social paradigm for Europe

Francine Mestrum[1]

Western European countries still have the best developed and the most efficient welfare states in the world. They are looked at with envy by many people from less developed countries. Yet, these welfare states are threatened, and instead of serving as a model for other countries, it may well be that the population of the EU will soon learn what it means to live with less security. The reason is very simple. The huge public debt, a consequence of bank bail-outs, will oblige countries to more and continuing austerity programmes.

In this contribution, I want to summarize what is being prepared at the level of the European Union for Europe’s social future. There should be no misunderstandings: even if much of the work is done by the European Commission, it is fully in line with the wishes of the European Council, that is the national governments. The aim of this article, then, is not to blame the European institutions, but to show how the change of scale at which decision-making is done contributes to making the policy changes almost invisible. While trade unions and social movements are mainly working within their national democracies, their governments are preparing  a new social paradigm at the European level. Moreover, many of the social changes are hidden in other policies or programmes, such as the internal market, EU2020, etc.

What our social protection may look like in the future:

read the report and the proposals

We should have highlighted this back in the fall, but failed to do so. The Association of Concerned African Scholars (ACAS) released a fantastic series of articles titled, “Africa’s Capital Losses: What Can Be Done?” The series is edited by Léonce Ndikumana and James Boyce, members of the Task Force’s Economist’s Advisory Council, and includes articles by Global Financial Integrity and Task Force Director Raymond Baker, as well as Tax Justice Network’s John Christensen and Nicholas Shaxson. From the introduction:

“In their 2011 pathbreaking book, Africa’s Odious Debts: How Foreign Loans and Capital Flight Bled a Continent, Léonce Ndikumana and James Boyce demonstrate the systematic draining from Africa of resources by this global system, in which rich individuals and large companies hide income and assets from public scrutiny and from taxation by transferring them across borders. Africa’s situation is aggravated by its vulnerability in the world economy, by the weaknesses of African states, and by the misguided assumption that this pattern stems only from the personal corruption of African leaders. In fact, despite the many differences between the rich countries of the West and developing countries in Africa, the same structural realities and the same institutions are implicated in the “fiscal crises” of Europe and North America and in the failure of African states to capture and channel sufficient resources to development.

It’s time to re-think the role of the World Bank, says former Colombian finance minister José Antonio Ocampo, who was recently one of the three contenders for heading it. And a basic lesson the bank needs to re-learn is never to impose any particular development model

When the World Bank’s new president, Jim Jong Kim, took over in July of this year, he did so after the first-ever open competition for the job. This, along with significant long-term changes in the structure of the world economy and its unsettled state, makes it an opportune time to re-think the role of the bank as one of the great international institutions. Such re-thinking must start with the lessons learned from our experience of development co-operation as well as from a clear understanding of the changes now taking place in the world economy. It means adapting the World Bank to the changing needs of the international community but also, in some cases, taking the institution back to its roots.

UK Chancellor George Osborne and his French and German counterparts are to call for global rules to clamp down on corporate tax avoidance.
The three will seek backing from other leaders at the G20 summit in Moscow.

Facebook allegedly paid no income tax in the US last year, and instead reclaimed 451 million US$ in taxes from the Internal Revenue Service, despite recording profits of more than 1 billion US$.