January 24, 2023
Clearly, we have a global problem which is not new, but which is accelerating exponentially. Inequality is a driver of poverty, and poverty will not solve itself with growth / economic recovery alone. Specific policy intervention is crucial, and the scale and complexity of this problem requires global policy coordination just as much as the GFC and pandemic did. What is shocking however, is that instead of uniting to address this poverty tsunami, the Global North’s agenda appears to be pro-poverty. For example, Oxfam further stated that “countries face significant challenges in taxing wealth, and there is a need for concrete proposals on how to do so, especially for developing countries. There are very real constraints that revenue authorities face.” Really Oxfam? The world’s largest financial secrecy jurisdictions are the USA, Switzerland, Singapore, Hong Kong, Luxembourg, Japan, and Germany, with a total weight of ~59%. I am pretty sure that those countries do not face any technical or capacity challenges to ‘tax the rich’ if they wanted to. But why would they if they are never held to account? The USA alone is weighted 26% but the USA is STILL not part of the automatic exchange of information. Oxfam is again playing into the prevailing false narrative that this global inequality and poverty problem because we don’t tax the rich is a developing country problem, when all the data show that it most certainly is NOT. This is not what we need from Oxfam.
2023-01-Caribbean-Monthly-Report