Tax Panel At The United Nations On Global Tax Reform To Produce Financing For Development

Steven Dean (Boston University; Google Scholar) moderates a panel on Global Tax Reform to Produce Financing for Development at the United Nations today as part of its Financing for Development Dialogues: From Evidence to Action:

The OECD promoted its 2021 global tax reform proposal with a brochure that featured a sun-drenched island overflowing with coconut trees, cash and gold. Although that publication falsely indicated that small island developing states should be blamed for the failure of the global tax system, that illustration hints at a different possibility. Global tax reform designed to serve rather than demonize developing states could unlock the revenues small island developing states and others need for climate resilience, health, and education.

In the 1950s, the United Nations served as the forum for ambitious efforts to tax multinational to deliver the resources developing states needed. The rise of the OECD in the 1960s served as a rebuke to those efforts, curbing the power of poor states to tax multinationals. Despite innovations such as the controlled foreign corporation rules—essentially early versions of today’s global minimum taxes—designed to promote the taxation of multinationals by wealthy states over time multinationals exploited the OECD's rules to avoid taxation everywhere.

Recent efforts to shift the center of global tax policymaking back to the United Nations could reverse that decades-long trend. Innovations such as the digital services taxes the United States and the OECD have fought hard against highlight the relatively simple ways in which UN-led reform could generate meaningful resources for developing countries.

Panelists: 

• Jay Butler (University of Virginia) 
• Steven Dean (Boston University; Google Scholar) (moderator)
• Christine Kim (Cardozo School of Law; Google Scholar) 
• Ivan Ozai (York University; Google Scholar)
• Attiya Waris (University of Nairobi; Google Scholar)

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