Illicit Financial Flows and the post-2015 agenda

Event Type
Public Lecture & Panel Discussion with Thomas Pogge & Raymond Baker

Location / Date
Bonn, 23.09.2014

German Development Institute / Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik (DIE)

Tax abuse constitutes a massive headwind against development. One common form of it is trade misinvoicing, used by multinational corporations (MNCs) to shift funds to affiliates in other jurisdictions that tax profits at lower rates or not at all. Global Financial Integrity estimates that $4.7 trillion were thus siphoned out of developing countries during the 2002-2011 period, $760 billion in 2011 alone. This is five or six times the sum total of all official development assistance flowing into these countries during the same periods. These numbers don’t even include other important forms of MNC abusive transfer pricing that are difficult to quantify. Even so, Christian Aid calculates that governments of developing countries have lost tax revenues of around $160 billion annually — about $2.5 trillion for the 2000-2015 Millennium Development Goals (MDG) period. “If that money was available to allocate according to current spending patterns, the amount going into health services could save the lives of 350,000 children under the age of five every year.”

Despite the enormity of this issue, it is barely in the UN’s framework of the post-2015 agenda and the new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which will succeed the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) from 2016. The present draft speaks vaguely of curbing illicit financial outflows from the developing countries (target 16.4) and of helping them improve their tax collection (target 17.1). But there are no specific demands on richer nations to stop facilitating this drain on development. We urgently need such reforms to curtail tax dodging as well as embezzlement, money laundering, and other criminal activities and thereby to enable developing countries to attain the revenues necessary to safeguard their citizens’ human rights. Such reforms would achieve much more than the foreign aid envisioned by the SDGs; and for many developing countries this step toward basic global justice would mean more than any amount of charity. Never before has there been so much popular support and political will to end the scandal of tax dodging. Pogge & Baker argue that we must seize this special opportunity to build a more transparent global financial system and thereby diminish a substantial impediment to development and poverty eradication.

Background:
Raymond W. Baker is an American businessman, scholar, author, and “authority on financial crime”. He is a graduate of Harvard Business School and President of Global Financial Integrity, a research and advocacy organization in Washington, D.C., working to curtail illicit financial flows. In 1996, Raymond Baker received a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation for a project entitled, “Flight Capital, Poverty and Free-Market Economics.” The project took him to 23 countries where he interviewed over 335 bankers, politicians, government officials, economists, attorneys, tax collectors, security officers, and social scientists on the relationships between commercial tax evasion, bribery, money laundering, and economic growth. Mr. Baker is the author of the acclaimed book "Capitalism’s Achilles Heel: Dirty Money and How to Renew the Free-Market System." In January 2009, Mr. Baker brought together a coalition of research and advocacy organizations and over 50 governments to form the Task Force on Financial Integrity and Economic Development. Mr. Baker is also a member of the High Level Panel on Illicit Financial Flows from Africa, chaired by former South African President Thabo Mbeki.

Thomas Pogge received his PhD in philosophy from Harvard and is the Leitner Professor of Philosophy and International Affairs and founding Director of the Global Justice Program at Yale University. He holds part-time positions at King's College London and the Universities of Oslo and Central Lancashire. Pogge is a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science as well as President of Academics Stand Against Poverty (ASAP), an international network aiming to enhance the impact of scholars, teachers and students on global poverty, and of Incentives for Global Health, a team effort toward developing a complement to the pharmaceutical patent regime that would improve access to advanced medicines for the poor worldwide. Pogge's recent publications include Politics as Usual (Polity 2010); World Poverty and Human Rights (Polity 2008); John Rawls: His Life and Theory of Justice (Oxford 2007); and Freedom from Poverty as a Human Right (Oxford & UNESCO 2007).

Hinweis

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