Global Tax Governance from a Feminist Perspective.
The tax governance system is a set of institutional rules and power relations that is increasingly contested. The traditional economic view has depoliticised taxation, asserting that systems must be efficient and neutral and portraying them as a complex technical issue with a single purpose of providing resources to states to function. Taxation, however, is inherently political, and has a critical purpose as a redistributive tool with transformative potential if applied in a progressive manner.
Under the neoliberal paradigm, there has been a race to the bottom in international tax rates for multinational corporations and wealthy people. This context gives space for tax abuse and illicit financial flows, which are exacerbated by the digitalization of the economy and are a clear violation of human rights obligations that have severe gender consequences because they drive austerity measures and increased indirect taxes. Within this project, we examine how a feminist approach to global taxation would redress imbalances in global tax governance and promote progressive taxation systems nationally.
We focus on the proposed framework on fiscal legitimacy (developed by Attiya Waris, the UN Independent Expert on foreign debt and human rights) which tries to build a new social contract using taxation as a tool to reshape societies by centring collective needs nstead of capital accumulation and growth.
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