Tax Justice and Global Inequality

In the wake of the Panama Papers scandal and similar leaks, tax havens are now firmly in the spotlight. Today, roughly half of all global trade still passes through tax haven jurisdictions, costing millions in lost revenue to countries around the world. Such practices affect all of us, but are most keenly felt by poorer people in developing countries, where unfair tax practices have become a major obstacle to development, and which have allowed multinational corporations to continue to exploit developing economies. This collection argues that, for developing countries to achieve social justice and lasting prosperity, they must take control of their own tax destinies, and that this will also be crucial to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals.

Covering such topics as natural resource management, representation in global tax institutions and effective strategies for building and protecting tax bases, the collection brings together expertise from a variety of countries and disciplines. It explores the options available to developing countries, and provides a basis for concerted action by tax authorities, policy makers, academics and civil society experts to design tax systems that can sustain a just society.

Krishen Mehta is a Senior Global Justice Fellow at Yale University, and was formerly a partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers. He serves on the Board of Aspen Institute’s Business and Society Program, and on the Asia Advisory Council of Human Rights Watch. He is a Director of Tax Justice Network based in the UK, and a Trustee of the Social Science Foundation at the University of Denver. He has been a guest speaker at the American University in Washington DC, at Yale University In New Haven, CT, and at Tokyo University in Japan.

Esther Shubert is a PhD candidate in philosophy at Yale University working on theories of equality. She is a member of Yale's Global Justice Program where her work has focused primarily on illicit financial flows. She has also done research on illicit financial flows at the United Nations Development Programme and as a consultant to the United Nations' Independent Expert on the effects of foreign debt and other related international financial obligations.

Erika Dayle Siu is a tax and development policy specialist and has worked with the United Nations Development Programme and the International Centre for Taxation and Development. She was the first director of the Independent Commission for the Reform of International Corporate Taxation. She currently works on a team at the University of Illinois at Chicago to build economic research capacity for tobacco taxation in developing countries as part of the Bloomberg Initiative to Reduce Tobacco Use. Erika is a graduate of the New York University Law School and the Yale Divinity School.