From: Alejandro Valle Baeza (valle@SERVIDOR.UNAM.MX)
Date: Sun Aug 26 2007 - 21:02:02 EDT
TAX HAVENS CAUSE POVERTY "Taxes are what we pay for civilized society" The world's leading development agencies have taken a lead in the current debate about corruption and development, but have often ignored concerns about how tax havens encourage and enable capital flight and tax evasion. In a world of globalised capital markets, tax havens create an offshore interface between the illicit and licit economies. This interface corrupts national tax regimes and onshore regulation, and distorts markets by rewarding economic free-riders and mis-directing investment. Tax havens are a major cause of inequality and poverty. They function as a result of collusion between banks and other financial intermediaries and the governments of states and micro-states which host their activities. The major culprits include the United States, Britain, Switzerland and other European countries which promote tax havens and prevent efforts to clamp down on their activities. In June 2000, Oxfam published a briefing called Tax Havens: Releasing the Hidden Billions for Poverty Eradication, which drew attention to the harmful impacts of tax havens on developing countries and identified why their negative impacts are felt more forcefully in the South. In March 2005 we published a briefing paper called The Price of Offshore which estimated that the amount of funds held by individuals in offshore tax havens, is about 11.5 trillion US dollars. Using this estimate we calculated the worldwide tax revenue lost on the income from these assets at 255 billion dollars. Every year. This amount would more than plug the financing gap to achieve the United Nation's Millenium Development Goal of halving world poverty by 2015. In 2005, Christian Aid published a report called The Shirts Off Their Backs in which the authors warned that unless the massive gaps in poorer countries' revenues are plugged by responsible tax policies and international action to curb tax havens, the UN's poverty reduction targets will be missed. The Shirts Off Their Backs shows how poorer countries are losing $500 billion a year in revenues to prosperous international tax dodgers. More on this: http://weave.nine.ch/domains/taxjustice.net/cms/front_content.php?idcat=2 Alejandro Valle Baeza -- Posgrado Facultad de Economía Av. Universidad 3000 Circuito interior México 04510, DF México Tel. 55-56222148 fax 55-56222158 Página web: http://usuarios.lycos.es/vallebaeza
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