Briefs

Tax the rich. Build a better world.

Not long ago, the ultra-wealthy paid much more in taxes. Today, the top .01% and giant corporations have rigged the rules so drastically that some billionaires end up paying zero percent. Nothing. Instead, working families are bearing more than their fair share of the tax burden—at a time when record inflation is steadily eating away at wages. It’s way past time to flip the script. What’s stopping us?

First Crisis Then Catastrophe

Unless G20 leaders, the IMF and the World Bank act immediately, crises of inflation, inequality and COVID-19 could push over a quarter of a billion more people into extreme poverty in 2022.

Ukraine crisis: How and why it could cause hunger crises globally to worsen

Pandemic of Greed

The human and economic cost of the COVID-19 pandemic has been staggering, in terms of lives lost, human suffering, and economic damage. As we enter the third year of the pandemic, we still find ourselves on a rollercoaster of lockdowns, variants, and broken promises. Inequality has actively prolonged the pandemic, devastating lives and livelihoods. Women have shouldered an especially heavy burden.

While effective vaccines provide hope, their rollout has tipped, from a natural desire to protect citizens, into nationalism, greed, and self-interest. Large numbers of people in low-income countries face the virus unprotected and millions of people would still be alive today if they had had access to a vaccine. Big pharmaceutical corporations have been given free rein to prioritize profits ahead of vaccine equality. As we mark two years since the official pandemic was declared, we still have a chance to gain the upper hand on the virus, but only if everyone, everywhere has access to vaccines and treatments.

The Redistributive Impact of Fiscal Policy Indicator

The United Nations adopted a new indicator to track progress against one of the Sustainable Development Goals. For the first time, all nations will be expected to regularly measure their level of income inequality. They are also expected to track the impact of their fiscal policies on income inequality. That opens new opportunities of advocacy for tax justice advocates around the world: in the future, every fiscal reform proposal could be assessed in terms of its impact on inequality.

The effect of the OECD’s Pillar 1 proposal on developing countries

In October last year 136 nations reached a high-level agreement to reform the way the taxable profits of multinational corporations are distributed among countries. These countries are expected to sign a legal agreement later this year. Astoundingly, no impact assessment was published for one of the two pillars of this agreement. Using publicly available data and a methodology developed by the consultancy Oxford Economics, Oxfam estimates the agreement’s impact on the tax revenue of 49 low and middle-income countries.