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Democracy / Economics / International

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TTIP and Human Rights: The Need to Fight Harmful Tax Practices

Matthias Goldmann is Junior Professor of International Public Law and Financial Law at the Goethe University in Frankfurt. This guest post is Part 1 of a special series on TTIP that we’ll be running in the coming weeks.

Anti-TTIP protesters in London, 2014. Wikimedia Commons.

Anti-TTIP protesters in London, 2014. Wikimedia Commons.

The ongoing debate about the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) has shed new light on the effects of trade on economic and social equality. While it is well understood in theory that free trade is likely to generate aggregate welfare benefits, in practice the allocation of these benefits seems to be highly unequal. In developed economies, free trade might lead to the outsourcing of jobs of low-skilled workers to places with lower labor costs. In developing economies, trade might generate low-skilled jobs, but with international competition preventing wages from rising. Entrepreneurs and trading companies rather than workers seem to collect a large share of the benefits of international trade. As I will argue, this threatens the economic, social and cultural rights (ESC rights) of low-skilled workers. Free trade agreements (FTAs) are therefore only acceptable to the extent that participating governments take measures to mitigate their impact on low-skilled workers. To generate revenue for such measures, states should devise strategies to combat international tax evasion and tax competition.

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Economics / Governance / International

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Interview: Peter Dietsch on Catching Capital

Taxation is amongst the most hotly debated and politically contentious issues of the twenty-first century.  It has long been an important component of state policy for funding public services and managing inequalities.  Recently, it has increasingly been under the spotlight in virtue of international concerns – worries about multi-national companies shifting profits to low-tax jurisdictions and wealthy indDietschividuals exploiting tax loopholes, often to the effect of reducing state tax revenues.  Such realities raise important questions about the ethics of taxation in a globalised era and have been the focus of much work by Université de Montreal philosopher Peter Dietsch across his work in The Journal of Political Philosophy, Review of International Studies, Moral Philosophy and Politics, Ethical Perspectives, and the volume Global Tax Governance – What is Wrong With It and How to Fix It (co-edited with Thomas Rixen). In 2015, Peter published a book – Catching Capital: The Ethics of Tax Competition – on these issues and, when the opportunity presented itself, we took the chance to interview Peter about this work and heard some of his interesting reflections on the subject:

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