#Googletax, still: Why it’s not over yet

Here’s a quickish breakdown of Google UK’s accounting for the HMRC audit which has just been settled. It raises a serious question over how much – if even any – of the £130m actually relates to a challenge against international profit-shifting. And brings us that bit closer to crossing the Rubicon of corporate tax transparency…

Credit where credit’s due: this is entirely down to the digging of Bloomberg’s Jesse Drucker (unless I’ve made any mistakes, which will be my fault alone). It is however almost entirely Jesse’s fault that we’re still seeing headlines about Google (even if they don’t all credit him).

The UK subsidiary’s accounts to 2015 – which include the announced deal with HMRC – became public yesterday, and Jesse’s scoop is based on putting together the notes to the financials over the last few years, to identify a significant inconsistency in the story.

#Googletax: A triumph against profit-shifting?

The spin from Google, and also the UK government, most notably Chancellor George Osborne but also HMRC, has been that the £130m over ten years represents the fruits of a crackdown on international profit-shifting. After all, this is where public anger and policy pressure has been directed. And as a consequence, all the reporting has followed suit.

Google’s Matt Brittin even claimed specifically that the settlement reflected the new tax rules (by implication, the OECD BEPS changes and the government’s introduction of the Diverted Profits Tax) – which, while patently nonsense (neither change is backdated, let alone to 2005), confirmed the impression that this was about profit-shifting.

The first cracks were suggested by the Times’ remarkable story, in which Alexi Mostrous uncovered that HMRC “officials are understood to have concluded that the company’s offshore arrangements were legitimate”, and not subject to the Diverted Profits Tax (or ‘Google Tax’, a name briefed by officials upon its introduction).

The story in the accounts

The short version: some, and quite possibly all, of the settlement does not relate to international profit-shifting.

Here goes. Over the years since 2010 when the HMRC ‘open audit’ (#opennotopen) started, Google made provisions for the tax and interest that they thought they would eventually have to pay. These provisions feature, respectively, in notes 8 (tax) and 5 (interest) of the financial accounts.

First, the accounts to 2012 contain a provision of £24m for tax, and £3.6m for interest. The key point is the language. Google is specific that the provisions relate, indeed, to the HMRC audit – but only for ‘corporation tax in respect of employee share based compensation’. This is presumably a stock option scheme of some sort – nothing whatsoever to do with the widely discussed international structures that Google uses.

google AR2012 note8 google AR2012 note5

The accounts to 2013 show a small increase in the provisions, with the same details.

google AR2013 note8 google AR2013 note5 Finally, the newly released accounts (covering a year and half, after a change of accounting date) show a substantial increase in the provisions, and notes that £33m was the previous provision that now forms part of the overall £130m liability.

google AR2015 note8 google AR2015 note5

Where does that leave us? Google’s accounts show that the earlier provisions, which by 2015 are valued at £33m, are:

The only provisions made in relation to the HMRC audit of tax years from 2005 onwards (with the exception of £1m+, see below); and
Related only to employee share based compensation schemes.

What does it mean?

One possibility is that the £33m, a quarter of the announced settlement, had nothing to do with international profit-shifting – but that the remaining three quarters did. This would imply that Google was sufficiently confident throughout that although it was being audited on everything, it only provisioned in respect of this one element; and was then surprised.

Another apparent possibility is that (more or less) the entire £130m relates to this share scheme, in which case the settlement barely relates to the international profit-shifting issues over which credit has been claimed.

Most remaining possibilities, assuming no errors of accounting or my assessment above, would appear to lie in between these two polar suggestions: on which basis something between roughly a quarter and the entirety of the settlement does not relate to profit-shifting. Jolyon Maugham has neatly pulled out the additional, £1m+ provision for corporation tax that I’ve glossed over above and makes the case that there were indeed two distinct disputes, each eventually settled for liabilities in the tens of millions of pounds.

No, what does it actually mean?

Thought you’d never ask. The main effect of this curious story, and the ongoing reporting, will be to raise even more questions about this deal – and in particular, for the government and the Chancellor about how it was presented to the public. Google have batted back the questions from Bloomberg, but the Public Accounts Committee may have more leverage.

Any further unravelling will of course lead to even greater pressure in two areas: first, for greater transparency in this particular case (which will increasingly appear to violate taxpayer confidentiality – as the pronouncements of the Chancellor and HMRC may be felt to have already done); and second, for a powerful policy response that will provide the public with the kind of reassurance that is currently, painfully absent.

As I wrote previously, this would take the form of committing to publish the OECD standard country-by-country reporting (CBCR). It could come unilaterally from Google (perhaps unlikely, but don’t rule it out); or it could from the government. And in fact, since I wrote about this, and called for the same on the Today programme, the Chancellor has indeed pledged his support for public CBCR. {One to file under ‘correlation is not causation’, but at the deeper level not – public CBCR is the original Tax Justice Network policy proposal, and has gone from being written off as lunacy in 2003, to being on the verge of reality. File instead under ‘Advocacy successes where attribution is actually not unreasonable’.}

What remains is for this pledge to be made specific: for the UK to announce and deliver legislation mandating publication of country-by-country reporting, and to work publicly and privately to ensure that European Commission – currently sitting on the impact assessment they commissioned from ~~LuxLeaks~~transparency champions PwC – makes the same call. An unparalleled step change in the accountability of multinationals, tax authorities and – in the tax sphere – governments too, is now within reach.

01/02/2016

Book launch: Inequality, uncounted

In reckoning the numbers of the people of the Commonwealth, or of a State or other part of the Commonwealth, aboriginal natives shall not be counted.

-Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act 1900, section 127.

Imagine a world of such structural inequality that even the questions of who and what get counted are decided by power. A world in which the “unpeople” at the bottom go uncounted, as does the hidden “unmoney” of those at the very top. Where the unpeople are denied a political voice and access to public services. And the unmoney escapes taxation, regulation, and criminal investigation, allowing corruption and inequality to flourish out of sight.

This is the world we live in. A world of inequality, uncounted.

We may pride ourselves on being the generation of open data, of big data, of transparency and accountability, but the truth is less palatable. We are the generation of the uncounted—and we barely know it. But things may be changing, albeit slowly.

The Wicked Problems Collaborative has launched its first book, ‘What do we do about inequality?’ . The text above is the introduction to my chapter, ‘Inequality, Uncounted’ – which is a lighter, more direct telling of the argument made in the paper published last month in Development.

The indefatigable Chris Ostereich (@costrike) led the project, and edited the book, bringing together a really impressive group of contributors (and kickstarter funding). Below is the table of contents – and here’s the link to the book (it’s on Kindle so yes, on Amazon. Sorry).

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
DEDICATION
OPENING VOLLEYS
CONTENTS
FIGURES
WPC CONTRIBUTORS ON TWITTER
EDITOR’S NOTE
THE BLIND MEN AND THE ELEPHANT
PREFACE
INTRODUCTION
WHAT DO WE DO ABOUT INEQUALITY?
1. TO ADDRESS INEQUALITY, THINK GLOBAL | Dylan Matthews
2. THE IDEOLOGICAL STRAITJACKET | Sean McElwee
3. WHAT DOES EQUIPOTENTIALITY BRING TO THE TABLE IN TERMS OF EQUALITY? | Michel Bauwens
4. INEQUALITY, UNCOUNTED | Alex Cobham
5. THE INEFFICIENCY OF INEQUALITY | Daniel Altman
6. IS CAPITALISM UNFAIR? | Chris MacDonald
7. THE PROBLEM OF INEQUALITY | Kevin Carson
8. TOWARDS RENOUNCING PERSONAL PRIVATIZATION | Nicholas Archer
9. THE INEQUALITY OF WILDNESS AND THE NECESSITY OF WILDNESS FOR EQUALITY | Megan Hollingsworth
10. THE STICKINESS OF INJUSTICE | Jennifer Reft
11. NOBLE FICTIONS AND SACRED TEXTS Paul Fidalgo
12. THE VOICES THAT ARE NOT YOUR OWN: MAINTAINING CHOICE IN THE AGE OF THE ALGORITHM | John C. Havens
13. THE EMPATHY DEFICIT: WHY THE INEQUALITY CRISIS IS ALSO A CRISIS OF EMPATHY | Robin Cangie
14. BILLIONAIRES WITH DRONES: FROM OLIGARCHY TO NEOMEDIEVALISM | Frank A. Pasquale
15. WHAT SHOULD THE WORLD LEARN FROM THE EXPERIENCE OF INEQUALITY IN LATIN AMERICA? | Patrick Iber
16. OCCUPY SANDY AND THE FUTURE OF SOCIALISM | Sam Knight
17. THE “PLACE OF BIRTH” LOTTERY | David Kaib & Chris Oestereich
18. INEQUALITY AND THE BASIC INCOME GUARANTEE | Scott Santens
19. THE AGE OF INEQUALITY: CAUSES, DISCONTENTS, AND A RADICAL WAY FORWARD | Jason Hickel & Alnoor Ladha
20. TWENTIETH CENTURY SOLUTIONS WON’T WORK FOR TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY INEQUALITY | David O. Atkins
21. THE STATE OF AFFAIRS: HEADING FROM BAD TO WORSE | Adnan Al-Daini
22. THE TRAGEDY OF OUR MIDDLE CLASS | Peter Barnes
23. POST-SCARCITY ECONOMICS: WHY ARE SOME PUNDITS AND ECONOMISTS STILL ENAMORED OF AUSTERITY? | Tom Streithorst
24. INCOME INEQUALITY: WHAT’S WRONG WITH IT, AND WHAT’S NOT | F. Spagnoli
25. TURMOIL & TRANSITION | Harold Jarche
26. KNOWLEDGE, POWER, AND A POTENTIAL SHIFT IN SYSTEMIC INEQUALITY | Jon Husband
27. THE QUESTION OF INEQUALITY: A VIEW FROM INDIA | Akhila Vijayaraghavan
28. WHAT YOU KNOW IS BASED ON WHO YOU KNOW | Deborah Mills-Scofield
29. INEQUALITY IS ABOUT THE POOR, NOT ABOUT THE RICH | Miles Kimball
30. TO TACKLE EXTREME POVERTY, WE MUST TAKE ON EXTREME INEQUALITY | Nick Galasso & Gawain Kripke
31. ADDRESSING WEALTH EQUALITY WITH INVESTING SOLUTIONS FROM NATURE, NURTURE, AND SCIENCE | Rosalinda Sanquiche
32. THE LOGIC OF STUPID POOR PEOPLE: STATUS, POVERTY AND GATEKEEPING | Tressie McMillan Cottom
33. POOR CHOICES | Melonie Fullick
34. THE PARTICIPATION GAP | Devin Stewart
35. GETTING THE FRAME RIGHT | KoAnn Skrzyniarz
36. THE FIRST JOB CREATOR | Adam Kotsko
37. LIFE IN THE TREETOPS: A CHOICE OF CHASTENING PRIVATION OR DEBASING PROSPERITY | Chris Oestereich
NOW WHAT?
IT’S LONELY OUT IN SPACE
PARTING SHOTS

26/01/201626/01/2016

Three lessons of #Googletax

Since news broke that Google has negotiated a deal with the UK tax authority following the latter’s audit stretching back to 2005, criticism has been growing – of the deal, of the UK government and of the company. What might we learn from #Googletax?

1. The world has changed; oh, and life’s not fair

On the face of it, Google may feel a bit hard done by. After years of criticism over your tax bill, you agree to pay £130 million more – and what do get? More criticism. Criticism of your tax bill and, additionally, of your relationship with government.

Well, the world has changed. Nobody quite knew what to say when Starbucks decided in 2013 to raise its tax payment after criticism. Margaret Hodge, famously stern then-chair of the Public Accounts Committee, summed things up by welcoming the payment while stressing that the system still needed sorting.

But the world has changed. Prem Sikka quickly calculated Google’s effective tax rate (given some necessary assumptions on relative profitability of UK operations) at around 2.77%. Richard Murphy suggested tax of around £200 million each year would be about right, as did Jolyon Maugham QC (and like Prem, put Google’s new effective rate near 3%).

Now you might point out that none of these three are exactly ‘tax is theft’ flagbearers. But the tax-twittersphere was surprisingly quiet – where normally it likes nothing more than an event like this as an excuse to accuse each other of committing vile, ideological sins while pretending to analyse objectively, this time things were pretty calm. Nobody seemed keen to commend Google’s tax payment, nor to defend their doing a deal.

In fact, I think there’s a marked difference in public attitudes. The depth and breadth of understanding seems beyond any previous peak (not least the important heights of UK Uncut); and the general sense that a distribution of taxable profit between countries in proportion to the scale of economic activity would be about right. Who knows where that might lead?

It seems overwhelmingly clear that Google has come out of this badly, in terms of reputational impact – and that’s before they appear before the now upcoming Public Accounts Committee hearing. They may feel like they’d have been better off to keep their heads down.

So, life’s not fair.

2. Do no evil

On the other hand… A less aggressive tax position would have allowed Google to avoid (the open audit from which this deal, and the attendant bad publicity arises.

Imagine the conversation:

“So, this way we’ll pay tax at about 2.77%. I even think HMRC might go for that.”
“Meh. We can pay much less than that.”
“Really? Isn’t that, like, pushing it?”
“Tax is theft. Tax is evil. And you heard the man: Do no evil.”

No, I don’t suppose it went anything like that. But still: this wasn’t done blind. At some point, someone thought that the position they had was entirely defensible, and any risk (reputational or in terms of subsequent tax assessment) was worth taking; and that’s the position that ultimately got signed off by management and auditors.

As Owen Barder says, CSR means two things: Pay your tax, and don’t be corrupt. With this tax position agreed and hailed as a success by the UK government, there’s presumably no way back on that front. And presumably no corruption to address. So what could Google do now to reclaim its reputation?

I’d say there’s only one thing that might have any impact. And right now, it would still be a long shot. But it’s this: commit in Google’s own, inimitable, data-led way, to publish its full, country-by-country reporting (CBCR).

This would hurt. A lot. As much as Google tax is being picked over now, we’d have much more fun if we had the actual data showing the full difference between where it does business and where it pay tax. But… once it was done, it would be done. And all the pressure would be on Google’s rivals to follow suit, making them the story instead whether they published or not.

Along the way, this might help make Google what it presumably always hoped to be: not just doing no evil, but positively doing a bit of good. If they wanted to go the whole hog, they could even help us knock together the open database which we hope will provide a platform for all the eventually public CBCR data.

3. The Golden Thread is (still) worth following

What of government? After coming out early to announce the Google deal as a ‘victory’, a ‘real vindication of the government’s approach’, Chancellor George Osborne must have spent the rest of his time at Davos kicking himself. But if not, his Conservative colleague Boris Johnson certainly was – writing the next morning that “we should recognise that the fault in the whole affair lies with our national arrangements“. And it got worse for Osborne: a subsequent headline had Prime Minister David Cameron ‘distancing himself‘ from the Chancellor’s triumphal claims.

The government might, like Google, think things are rather unfair. After all, they’ve done a deal to get more tax, not less. But the nature of the deal, and the fact that taxpayer confidentiality would seem to prevent any effective defence against the 3% claim, leaves them exposed at PAC and more generally.

That’s why this is the right time for the government to take the initiative, get back on the front foot, bring out the disinfectant and mix any other positive metaphors it can think of. David Cameron came to power claiming he would usher in a new era of transparency, and in some aspects of international tax he can fairly claim to have delivered a fair bit already.

In May, the UK will host an anti-corruption summit where it had hoped that the Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies would follow in signing up to public registers of beneficial owners of companies. It seems increasingly unlikely that this will happen – but the Google debacle provides an opportunity for a real policy commitment that would put the UK, too, back on the side of the angels.

Having helped along the OECD’s mandate to develop a country-by-country reporting standard while hosting the 2013 G8, the government then saw the OECD deliver a technically good standard with the minimum (and most unequal) possible transparency.

The tax justice movement lost that round of the argument because OECD members saw the measure’s real value as being about holding multinationals to account (so only tax authorities needed the data); while multinationals lobbied fiercely against publication, even once they had had to accept the compliance costs.

What was lost was the point that CBCR is not just about companies’ accountability – it’s also about governments’ accountability. You can’t show you’re getting a fair share of tax from multinationals if you don’t publish this data. And you also can’t show that other governments, like Ireland or Luxembourg or the Netherlands, aren’t ripping you off.

This would be the perfect time for the UK government to discover that the Golden Thread applies at home as well as in developing countries, and to announce that it will publish CBCR data itself (in open, machine-readable format, natch); and advocate for this to be an EU-wide measure.

21/01/201621/01/2016

Time for a global compact on financial transparency?

Apologies for the recent absence of the Tax Justice Research Bulletin. The TJRB will be back soon, and in the meantime here’s a review of the major research contribution from the second half of 2015. This longish post is based on my remarks at the book’s launch in Oslo in December (and includes a couple of the authors’ slides), where the idea of a global compact ended up being discussed at some length…

Challenging narratives: Illicit flows, corruption, Africa and the world

Ibi Ajayi & Léonce Ndikumana (eds.), 2015, Capital flight from Africa: Causes, effects and policy issues, Oxford University Press.

This new volume from the AERC (African Economic Research Consortium) is a very welcome milestone in scholarship on the complex and contested areas of capital flight and illicit financial flows (IFF). It is more than that however. It is a powerful book in terms of what it represents; what it contributes; and above all, of what it challenges. These are discussed in turn below, before consideration of a major policy opportunity that now beckons.

Context

Capital flight is defined as consisting of (predominantly illicit) unrecorded movements of capital across borders, made up of discrepancies between the recorded sources and uses of foreign exchange, combined with the movements hidden through trade mispricing. The larger set of IFF will also include recorded flows of illicit capital, for example through money laundering. However, with the improvement of the blockchain and cryptocurrencies in recent times these financial issues may no longer exist in the future, major corporations are picking up various cryptocurrencies as legible. This means people can even look to PayPal Krypto kaufen to legally invest and trade in multiple cryptocurrencies.

This is only the second major volume to address IFF directly, and it is no coincidence that the Norwegian government has provided support to both. This issue, now firmly on the global policy agenda, was nowhere when Norway first began to promote it. Has any donor managed such powerful impact on any issue, through targeted, strategic interventions? And yes, full disclosure: the Tax Justice Network, too, has benefited from Norwegian funding.

The first IFF volume, Draining Development, was published by the World Bank in 2012 following a 2009 conference. Despite initial agreement, the Bank backed out of providing a full study itself and instead brought together external researchers (myself included). The resulting work remains a milestone, but is inevitably somewhat patchy given the quite disparate nature of the group.

Ajayi & Ndikumana, in contrast, have produced a volume with a good degree of coherence across the individual chapters and above all in terms of the overall arc, presumably reflecting the authors’ common AERC involvement as well as the editors’ guiding hand.

The report of the African Union and Economic Commission for Africa’s High Level Panel (HLP) on Illicit Financial Flows out of Africa, chaired by H.E. Thabo Mbeki, has already brought significant policymaker focus to the issues – including outside the continent. The HLP report was itself preceded by an IFF focus for the 2014 Tana High Level Forum on Peace and Security in Africa; and over many years, the development of a strong civil society engagement spearheaded by Tax Justice Network – Africa.

And so the new volume represents further evidence of African leadership on these issues, in the research sphere also. But its contribution is greater than this.

Major findings

First, the book provides updated (Ndikumana & Boyce) estimates of the scale of capital flight from the continent over four decades. In the context of inevitable difficulties of estimating from data anomalies, things which are deliberately hidden – as well as general weaknesses of data quality and/or availability – these are the leading time-series estimates available (more on the question of estimates below). Data quality is very important to make sure you have the right analytics for collection, this is where businesses can do self-service data preparation to help keep consolidate and clean their data.

The book’s major contributions lie in the analysis of the determinants, and as importantly the non-determinants, of capital flight. The non-determinants include:

risk-adjusted returns (chapter 2: Ndikumana, Boyce & Ndiaye);
‘orthodox’ monetary policy (high interest rates in particular – chapter 6: Fofack & Ndikumana);
capital account liberalisation (results for domestic financial liberalisation are less clear – chapter 7: Lensink & Hermes); and
‘macro fundamentals’ (especially the pursuit of inflation control and balance of payments sustainability – chapter 9: Weeks).

Weeks’ sharp statement of findings arguably applies across the wider set of results too:

“the orthodox narrative that capital flight results from unsound macro policies [is reversed]. On the contrary, capital flight may force governments into policies that work against the majority of the population”

Evidence is also found for the following determinants of capital flight:

external debt (much of which has historically left again through the ‘revolving door’ – chapters 2, 3: Ajayi, and 5: Murinde, Ocheng & Meng);
weak rules and/or capacity (throughout, but most clearly in chapter 10: Arezki, Rota-Graciozi & Senbet, which addresses the impact of thin capitalisation rules in resource-rich countries);
habit, and the impact of continuing impunity – including social determinants of tax compliance and the possibility of vicious circles of IFF and governance (chapters 5, 11: Ayogu & Gbadebo-Smith, and 12: Kedir); and far from least
international financial secrecy (chapters 8: Massa, 9, 13: Barry, 14, and 15: Moshi).

Taken together, these findings provide a base of new evidence sufficiently broad that it has implications not only for national policymakers, but also for the wider narrative.

A new challenge to sticky narratives

There are a number of sticky narratives in development. As in other fields, these are stories which seem to have a staying power in popular and policy discourse that far outlives any basis they may have in technical research. Two of these come together in the issues explored here.

Perhaps the stickiest of narratives, and certainly one of the most pernicious, is the persistent association of corruption with poverty. This narrative has its roots in self-justifying colonial discourse of fitness to rule (and to be ruled), and its persistence reflects the decades-long promulgation in the media (and by some NGOs) of images of kleptocratic elites in post-independence regimes. The largely (though far from exclusively) African identity of those states (i.e. those that most recently gained independence) often provides an additionally unpleasant (and sticky) racist element.

The Corruption Perceptions Index, which aggregates multiple surveys (largely of international elites), is highly correlated with per capita GDP: so respondents tend to perceive poorer countries as more corrupt. But the consistent presence of Somalia, for example, near the bottom; or of Switzerland near the top; may reveal more about those whose perceptions are surveyed, than those who are perceived.

One of the motivations for the creation of the Tax Justice Network’s Financial Secrecy Index was precisely to challenge this view, by using objectively verifiable criteria to rank jurisdictions according to their provision of financial secrecy to non-residents: if you will, the selling of corruption services. Top ranking – that is, the biggest global provider of financial secrecy – is Switzerland. The United States comes in third place, Mauritius 23^rd and Ghana 48^th.

The second sticky narrative holds that capital flight is, in effect, a punishment on (especially African?) governments for bad policy. This can act in combination with the first to produce the story that African capital flight is the result of African corruption.

The findings of the AERC volume provide a powerful challenge to this story. First, they offer some support to the old challenge: that it takes ‘two to tango’. Or as Mobutu Sese Seko is quoted: “It takes two to corrupt – the corrupter and the corrupted” (p.406, citing Bob Geldof). In this view, African elites may be culpable but so too are their ‘partners’.

More importantly, the findings support a new challenge: What if most of the blame lies elsewhere? While governments have tended to pursue the policies shown to be ineffective in reducing capital flight, many of the real levers of power have lain outside the continent. In each of the following cases, for example, who is the corrupter and who the corrupted?

An anonymous BVI company is awarded a cheap Zambian mining concession, then flips it to a UK-listed plc
A Swiss bank holds a Nigerian resident’s overseas assets through a Jersey trust; nothing is reported to the Nigerian authorities
A US-headquartered multinational shifts profit from Ghana to Luxembourg

We could go on; and indeed the book offers many examples. We should also consider other examples, such as that of a South African multinational shifting Uganda profits to Mauritius. We might perhaps settle on a view that the blame is very well shared indeed around the world. We might also wonder if poverty is not associated with corruption, so much as with exploitation by the corrupt.

At a minimum, the evidence presented by the AERC authors should serve to unstick the casual elision of corruption and poverty, and of capital flight and African policies.

As Nkurunziza (chapter 2) shows, the potential gains in poverty reduction from reversing capital flight are substantial.

Policy opportunities

The Sustainable Development Goals’ target to reduce illicit financial flows is a golden opportunity to catalyse improved quantitative methodologies; to ensure more and better data is available; and to introduce indicators that drive accountability for progress. But the SDGs will not fill the policy gap.

Although the ‘crazy ideas’ generated by civil society in the early 2000s now dominate the global policy agenda, there is a failure across the board – most obviously in terms of country-by-country reporting, and automatic exchange of tax information – to ensure that the benefits flow to developing countries as well as OECD members.

It seems that political power, rather than genuine commitment to transparency principles, still determines who is able to benefit. The Mbeki panel has called for greater progress in these areas. But is there an opportunity to sidestep, or indeed to leapfrog, much of the current issues by taking a more direct approach?

The final chapters of this important volume (15; and 16 – Boyce & Ndikumana in particular) detail a wide range of policy responses to the various findings, from capital controls and debt audits to some of the fundamental challenges to financial secrecy that the Tax Justice Network exists to champion – not least, fully public country-by-country reporting for multinational companies.

A global compact on financial transparency

The most striking proposal, however, is one not currently on the international policy agenda: a global compact among governments, CSOs and international institutions, covering strategies at the national, continental and global levels. Boyce & Ndikumana highlight the importance of:

National governments integrating the various mechanisms and agencies that are relevant for each type of illicit flow;
Continental conventions to provide a framework for harmonisation and coordination of national initiatives;
Global civil society networks working more closely with local civil society organisations, with greater speed of communication, greater coordination and institutionalised collaboration.; and
Global initiatives that have ‘adequate enforcement capacity. At the moment, global conventions do not have the legal capacity to hold individual governments accountable for the implementation of relevant dispositions; their rules are not binding at the national level’ (p.413)

The proposal, and the last point above all, carries an echo of an earlier proposal for an international financial transparency convention. In 2009, the Norwegian Government Commission on Capital Flight from Poor Countries (section 9.2.3) proposed such a convention, which would apply to all countries and include two main elements relating to transparency:

First, it must bind states not to introduce legal structures that, together with more specifically defined instruments, are particularly likely to undermine the rule of law in other states. Second, states which suffer loss and damage from such structures must have the right and duty to adopt effective countermeasures which will prevent structures in tax havens from causing loss and damage to public and private interests both within and outside of their own jurisdiction.

The commonalities with the proposed global compact are the recognition that states have responsibilities towards each other in respect of financial transparency; and that these are sufficiently serious, and their abnegation sufficiently damaging for other states and citizens, that practical enforcement is necessary.

The authors and others in the AERC network are now working on a range of country studies which will provide detailed further evidence of the issues in question. Meanwhile the ‘Stop the Bleeding‘ consortium that brings together a wide range of African actors to carry forward the agenda of the Mbeki panel is increasingly active.

Part of the reason this book is a milestone is that it sheds new light on what is known about the causes of illicit capital flows; offering supporting to the narrative that corruption and IFF should be seen not as the result of poverty, but rather as its exploitation – often led by external actors and always facilitated by financial secrecy elsewhere.

It will take on a new significance altogether if it also marks the starting point for an African-led process, perhaps backed by Norway and others, to develop an international agreement establishing the basic transparency expected – nay, required – from states toward one another; and making enforceable for the first time, claims against states for the damage caused by their financial secrecy.

[Talking of counter-measures – look out for a new TJN proposal launching tomorrow…]

13/01/2016

EC tax ruling: Belgian opportunity, big 4 at risk?

There’s been a good deal of coverage of the European Commission decision that Belgium’s ‘excess profit’ tax scheme is illegal, and so it must claw back unpaid tax from companies that were able to achieve double non-taxation on profits shifted into the jurisdiction. The focus has largely been on the implications for specific companies. It’s worth thinking more about different jurisdictions involved, and the possible risks facing the big 4 audit firms.

Basis of the EC tax ruling: Guaranteed double non-taxation

First, the ruling seems pretty clear cut, in principle at least, because the ‘excess profit’ approach is so transparently designed to engineer double non-taxation. Much like Ireland’s bad Apple agreement which accepted that the jurisdiction was not entitled to a share of profits that were shifted in but resulted from activity elsewhere, the Belgium scheme determined that any ‘excess profits’ would be exempt from tax.

The scheme defined excess profits as those bigger than an equivalent, purely domestic business would report – in other words, the result of a multinational’s activity elsewhere. Since these were by definition being reported in Belgium and not elsewhere, double non-taxation was the aim and indeed the guaranteed result. Bingo!

Whereas other cases (e.g. LuxLeaks) involved tailored responses to individual companies, the Belgium approach was consistent leading the Commission to conclude simply that:

We did not have to investigate the specific tax rulings to each company that are based on the scheme. They are automatically illegal.

Why Belgium? Who else?

As I said in various interviews, ‘België is niet de grote vis’ (Belgium is not the big fish), and the ruling is fascinating more because of the potential scale if a similar demand for clawbacks were applied to the bigger EU players in the profit-poaching business.

Our study of US multinationals, which we find to shift 25-30% of their global profits, shows that the majority of shifted profit goes through six jurisdictions: outside the EU Bermuda, Singapore and Switzerland; and inside, Ireland, Luxembourg and Netherlands. [New work from the US Joint Committee on Taxation, with access to firm-level rather than aggregate data, puts Cayman ahead of Singapore in the top six; ut the EU jurisdictions remain central.] Using global balance sheet data (predominantly capturing European multinationals), our earlier study confirmed the same three EU jurisdictions and also highlighted the roles of Belgium and Austria.

The figure, drawing from the results of Cobham & Loretz, 2014 using Orbis data, shows the share of declared profit which would be stripped away from each jurisdiction, if profits were to be aligned with each of the measures of multinationals’ economic activity (which was the declared aim of the OECD BEPS initiative). Belgium would stand to lose 25-50% of its declared profits under any measure of activity except intangible assets, a relatively extreme position.

Consistent with this view of Belgium as a location for profit-shifting by European multinationals in particular, the European Commission states that the clawback will amount to €700m, of which the bulk – around €500m – relates to European multinationals.

So while Belgium may not be such a grote vis internationally – it doesn’t register for US multinationals in the aggregate, for example – it’s certainly big enough for the European Commission to have bothered with.

But the really big money would be at stake if the same type of decision were to be taken with respect to the profit-shifting into Ireland, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. Of these, the relative complexity of mechanisms in the Netherlands (using trusts and special purpose entities for example, rather than blunt rulings) may make it a harder target. But rulings in Ireland and Luxembourg are already in the Commission’s sights. If the doubly non-taxed profits here were required to be retrospectively taxed at applicable statutory rates, the effects would be substantial indeed.

Company calculations

What would that look like from the point of view of companies involved? Consider the Belgian case. Gross profit that might have faced an effective rate of 15-20%, say, in the countries where the underlying economic activity took place, was shifted into Belgium and declared as ‘excess’ and therefore not subject to tax – in any jurisdiction.

Applying the unmitigated Belgian statutory rate instead will have two main results. First, the overall tax paid will almost certainly (assuming interest is dealt with appropriately) be higher than if neither the scheme itself, nor any alternate profit-shifting arrangement, had been used. The Commission notes that for the Belgian companies used, 50-90% of profits were ruled as ‘excess’; so it’s unsurprising that companies like AB InBev are assessing their options.

The second effect is a more forward-looking one: the changes that the Commission decision may imply for current and future profit-shifting strategies. If the possibility exists for retrospective taxation on shifted profits, do companies become less aggressive? Or is there simply a premium put on the more complex and/or iron-clad methods – for example, will Netherlands structures become even more dominant? Will it favour the UK’s CFC and patent box mechanisms, now with the OECD BEPS mark of acceptability, over other (smaller) jurisdictions?

Big 4 risks

A further impact is that on the big 4 and other professional services firms that may have provided the advice on which basis multinationals made the particular profit-shifting decisions – and themselves profited substantially in doing so. If there is a case for companies to sue over bad advice in the Belgian case, imagine the exposure – for example – of PwC, if a substantial share of LuxLeaks cases were equivalently unwound? If so then at some point, given the vast scale of profit-shifting and the potential tax liability if statutory rates rather than 0-1% were to be applied, a question of financial viability could even arise.

Looking forward again, will multinationals approach such tax advice differently if the possibility of retrospective action remains? Does this simply reduce the value of the advice, or change the willingness to consider it?

And for the big 4 and their staff, with the nature – and some of the risks – of selling profit–shifting advice now impossible to ignore, what are the ethical considerations?

An opportunity for Belgium?

Finally, what can Belgium do? Not such a big fish perhaps, but definitely on the hook. The immediate upside is unexpected tax revenue; the downsides are many.

First, the country stands clearly exposed for antisocial behaviour: profit-poaching in a time of austerity, when the social costs of lost revenues in EU partner countries could not be clearer. Second, trust: how will business view the jurisdiction after this reverse? And third, the stability of the model: given the substantial share of profit booked in the country that appears to have been unwarranted, what are the tax implications of losing the right to tax the non-‘excess’ element?

Here’s the opportunity. The one-off revenues from forcible clawbacks should be sufficient to cover for some time the losses from reduced inward profit-shifting. The question is whether Belgium aims to retain a role in profit-shifting – if it tries to appeal the ruling, struggles to regain credibility with multinationals, introduces and promotes new (OECD- and EC-compliant) mechanisms… or if instead, it takes the opportunity of being ‘caught’, and decides to chart a path towards less anti-social fiscal behaviour.

This could, for example, involve taking a lead in pushing for greater transparency of tax rulings; and in advocating for full enactment of the proposed Common Consolidated Corporate Tax Base (CCCTB) and associated proposal for formulary apportionment within the EU, which would eliminate much of the current profit-shifting; and of course publishing country-by-country reporting of multinationals, which would make the extent and direction of it transparent.

11/01/201611/01/2016

Uncounted: Power, inequalities and the post-2015 data revolution

Data: Facts and statistics collected together for reference or analysis

Revolution: A forcible overthrow of a government or social order, in favour of a new system

– Oxford English Dictionary

Just published: a special double issue of the journal Development on African inequalities, including my (open access) guest editorial setting out the thesis of ‘Uncounted’ – how power and inequality are intimately related to who and what go uncounted, from tax evasion in the 1% to the systematic exclusion of women and girls, from the corrupting influence of illicit financial flows to the marginalisation of people living with learning disabilities…

Guest Editorial: Uncounted: Power, inequalities and the post-2015 data revolution

Development (2014) 57(3–4), 320–337. doi:10.1057/dev.2015.28

People and groups go uncounted for reasons of power: those without power are further marginalized by their exclusion from statistics, while elites and criminals resist the counting of their incomes and wealth. As a result, the pattern of counting can both reflect and exacerbate existing inequalities. The global framework set by the Sustainable Development Goals will be more ambitious, in terms of both the counting and the challenging of inequalities, than anything that has gone before. This article explores the likely obstacles, and the unaddressed weaknesses in the agreed framework, and suggests a number of measures to strengthen the eventual challenge to inequalities, including by the promotion of tax justice measures.

Keywords: inequality; data; household surveys; SDGs; tax; uncounted

While the whole edition just came out, it is technically the 2014 volume. The majority of the papers are drawn from the Pan-African Conference on Tackling Inequalities in the Context of Structural Transformation held in Accra that year, and include some cracking contributions – not least important papers on gender inequality, sustainability and disabilities, as well as broader pieces on the economics and politics of inequality. Check out the full table of contents.

Power in the darkness, uncounted

15/12/201506/04/2020

Measuring illicit flows in the SDGs

Today (Tuesday 15 December) is the last day of the consultation on ‘grey’ indicators for the Sustainable Development Goals – that is, the ones where there remains a substantial degree of uncertainty about the final choice of indicator. To the surprise of literally no one, this includes 16.4: the illicit financial flows (IFF) indicator.

At the bottom of this post is my submission, which makes two main proposals for the way forward. Short version: we need a time-limited process to (i) improve data and (ii) build greater methodological consensus; and we need to include from the outset measures of exposure to financial secrecy which proxy for IFF risk.

The consultation

The full list of green and grey indicators is worth a look, as much as anything as a snapshot of where there’s more and less consensus on what the new development agenda will, and should, mean in practice. The late-October meeting of the Inter-Agency Expert Group (IAEG-SDGs) produced a plethora of documents showing the range of positions.

As an aside, I particularly liked the IAEG stakeholder group‘s demand for a proper inequality measure in 10.1:

The omission of any indicator to measure inequality between countries is glaring. We propose an indicator based on either the Gini coefficient or Palma ratio between countries which will not require additional data from states, but will provide a crucial guide to the effectiveness of the entire agenda. In general, inequality is not limited to income and therefore Gini and Palma must be measured within countries. Of the proposals to measure inequality, we support 10.1.1 comparison of the top 10% and bottom 40% and further breakdown wherever possible.

On illicit financial flows, this was the sensible and promising position of the UN Chief Statisticians:

Target 16.4. As commented by many countries, the indicator on illicit financial flows, while highly relevant, lacks an agreed standard methodology. Statistical programmes in international organizations stand ready to support the IAEG to initiate a process for developing such a methodology and support the gradual implementation of the indicator in future monitoring.

This engagement of international organisations is exactly what has been lacking in this area, and what organisations producing estimates such as our colleagues at Global Financial Integrity, have long called for: “don’t complain about our methodology, do better”.

Below is my quick submission. (The consultation phase only runs 9-15 December, and I only heard yesterday – clearly need to spend more time on UNSTAT.org…) Any comments very welcome.

Two proposals: Illicit flows in the SDGs

At present, there is great consensus on a target in the SDGs to reduce illicit financial flows, but a lack of consensus on an appropriate methodology and data sources by which to estimate them (and hence to ensure progress). There are important implications for the SDG indicator, set out below. To summarise:

A fully resourced, time-limited process is needed to bring together existing expertise in order to establish priorities for additional data, and a higher degree of consensus on methodology, so that by 2017 at the latest consistent IFF estimates (in current US$) will be available; and
Recognising that even the best such estimates will inevitably have a substantial degree of uncertainty, and are likely also to lack the granularity necessary to support national policy decisions, additional indicators should be adopted immediately which proxy for the risk of IFF and provide that granularity – specifically, by measuring the financial secrecy that countries are exposed to in their bilateral economic and financial relationships.

Illicit flows are, by definition, hidden. As such, most approaches rely on estimation on the basis of anomalies in existing data (including on trade, capital accounts, international assets and liabilities, and of the location of real activity and taxable profits of multinational corporations). Almost inevitably then, any estimate is likely to reflect data weaknesses as well as anomalies that result from illicit flows – so that one necessary response is to address the extent and quality of available economic and financial data, especially on bilateral stocks and flows.

In addition, there is no consensus on appropriate methodologies – despite leading work by many civil society organisations, and growing attention from academic researchers. In part, this reflects the failure of international organisations to engage in research here – a failure which should be rectified with some urgency, as part of the second necessary response which is to mobilise a sustained research effort with the aim of reaching greater consensus on high quality methodologies to estimate illicit financial flows.

Since the SDG indicators are needed almost immediately, the efforts to improve data and methodologies should be resourced in a strictly time-limited process, ideally under the auspices of a leading international organisation but recognising that the expertise resides with civil society (primarily among members of the Financial Transparency Coalition) and in academia, so that the process must be fully inclusive.

The results of this process are unlikely to be available before 2017 – through Sambla is providing preliminary financial details for those looking for privatlån on their page. In addition, it must be recognised that the eventual estimates of illicit financial flows (IFF) will not be free of uncertainty. Moreover, individual IFF types (e.g. tax evasion or money-laundering) do not map onto individual channels (e.g. trade mispricing or non-declaration of offshore assets), so that overall IFF estimates – however good – will not immediately support granular policy responses.

The SDG indicators should therefore include, starting immediately, a set of measures of risk. Since IFF are defined by being hidden, measures of financial secrecy therefore provide the appropriate proxies. The stronger a countries’ trade or investment relationship with secrecy jurisdictions (‘tax havens’), the greater the risk of hidden, illicit components. For example, there is more risk in trading commodities with Switzerland than with Germany; and less risk in accepting direct investment from France than from Luxembourg.

The Tax Justice Network publishes the major ranking of secrecy jurisdictions, the Financial Secrecy Index (FSI) every two years. This combines measures of financial scale with 15 key indicators of secrecy, in a range of areas relevant across the horizon of IFFs. The African Union/Economic Commission for Africa High Level Panel on Illicit Flows out of Africa, chaired by H.E. Thabo Mbeki, published pioneering work using the FSI to establish indicators of vulnerability for each African country, separately for trade, investment and banking relationships.

In addition, each country and jurisdiction should be asked to publish the following information annually, in order to track consistently the contribution of each to financial secrecy affecting others:

the proportion and absolute volume of domestically-established legal persons and arrangements (companies, trusts and foundations) for which beneficial ownership information is not publicly available;
the proportion and absolute volume of cross-border trade and investment relationships with other jurisdictions for which there is no bilateral, automatic exchange of tax information; and
the proportion and absolute volume of domestically-headquartered multinational companies that do not report publicly on a country-by-country basis.

These indicators map to three proposed IFF targets which are estimated to have very high benefit-cost ratios.

By prioritising the suggestions made here, the SDG process can make a great contribution to both the analysis and the curtailment of IFFs.

mbeki vulnerability

26/11/201512/05/2020

Are the 1% eating the planet?

Reposted from WhyGreenEconomy?

Existing analyses of the linkages between inequality and ecological damage have tended to the relatively general. Dario Kenner’s just-published working paper sets out to go further in one particular direction, by focusing on the impact of (over)consumption patterns of the very richest in each society.

You might think that this looks a bit like directing blame before the verdict is in – so I should say that this is not what the paper does. But also: given how many papers have been written about the damage done by the consumption of the poor, one alone looking at the richest won’t tip the balance. In fact, I’d take a bet that there are fewer papers with the current slant than there are studies focused just on the environmental implication of charcoal-burning by people living on lower incomes.

What the paper does above all is to raise a great many questions. First of all, there are questions about data. As anyone who has worked on tax (or read Piketty’s Capital) knows well, the finances of those at the top of the income and wealth distribution have a tendency to go uncounted – not to mention the consumption. And those who work on ecological impact know how much farther there is to go in order to nail a methodology to assess the footprint associated with a given consumption pattern.

The issues are of course multiplied by putting all this together with the aim of assessing the ecological footprint of HNWIs (high net-worth individuals, those with investable wealth of at least $1m), or even settling for the top 10% of households by income. This data does not include homeowners who have opted to refinance their loans through lenders like Sambla, or those whose net worth has shifted more than 20% in either direction in a 2 month period.

Nonetheless, it’s interesting to confirm for example that while the top 10% may not consume as disproportionately as they earn, their consumption patterns are nonetheless disproportionate in terms of damaging goods such as transport fuels and meat – and in high-income countries as well as lower-income countries.

Much better data, and substantially more research, is of course needed. But on the grounds that an overconsumption pattern is present, the paper also raises five concerns about the potential difficulty of addressing HNWI behaviour:

the competition for conspicuous consumption between (some) HNWIs;
that (some) HNWIs may be disconnected from the reality of the ecological crisis;
that HNWIs may not respond to sustainable consumption information initiatives;
that HNWIs have more resources with which to adapt to and insulate themselves from the impact of climate change; and
that environmental taxes may have less effect on HNWIs because they can afford to pay to continue polluting.

The last two go to an important issue which remains for future research: what are the marginal (rather than average) implications for consumption and ecological footprint of redistribution? It is quite possible, indeed plausible, that substantial redistribution may succeed in raising the consumption and footprint of lower-income beneficiaries, while barely affecting HNWIs who absorb any changes through saving behaviour.

This is broadly consistent with the observed higher marginal propensity to consume of lower-income households. In such a scenario, inequality reduction could well exacerbate (over)consumption. Exacerbating this, if inequality also hinders economic growth as the weight of research now suggests, (over)consumption possibilities at the national level may also be expanded by redistribution.

Would particular progressive policies mitigate or even reverse this effect? [And an aside: To what extent should researchers even continue to seek policy solutions based on marginal economic incentives? If global overconsumption reflects an insurmountable failure to adapt incentives due to our myopic behaviour, are the only sensible solutions to be found in more coercive policy imposition? In which case we should challenge inequality for its own sake, not as an ecological instrument…]

The paper’s parting shot is to note that HNWIs’ investment behaviour, on which even less data seems likely to be readily available, may actually represent the greater part of their footprint.

So, are the 1% eating the planet? We don’t have good enough evidence even to start answering that. What this paper make plain, however, is that the impact of the richest is at least potentially so great that the absence of any serious data on their ecological footprint is a failing that should no longer be ignored.

23/10/2015

Is ‘girl-centred development’ harmful fantasy?

Has the worm finally turned on the promotion of ‘girl-centred development’ in terms of claimed macroeconomic benefits? Daphne Jayasinghe posted on aspects of this yesterday; and the academic literature is pointing the same way.

The Journal of International Development has just published a paper by Cynthia Caron and Shelby Margolin, Rescuing Girls, Investing in Girls: A Critique of Development Fantasies.

The authors analyse “three girl-centred campaigns [and find that they] identify and diagnose girls’ problems and prescribe solutions that not only circumscribe girls’ futures, but are also counterproductive.”

From SciDevNet’s handy summary:

These campaigns do not recognise girls as individuals, each with specific abilities and personal aspirations, but rather assume that all girls want to be educated, raise families and become wage earners,” write Cynthia Caron and Shelby Margolin, two development scholars at Clark University in the United States…

The authors say these programmes support a “development fantasy”, promoting education as a way to “invest in girls” and increase their economic value. The campaigns aim to further economic growth under the guise of girl empowerment, say Caron and Margolin, perpetuating what they see as a “failed development narrative that economic growth inevitably leads to an equitable future for all”.

Has the worm turned? Let’s hope so. The need for a genuine focus on women’s empowerment is far too great for it to be pushed down the channel of fantasy.

Here’s the full abstract:

The girl child increasingly is at the centre of development programming. We draw on Slavoj Žižek’s notion of fantasy to show how and, more importantly, why girl-centred initiatives reproduce the shortcomings of women and gender-focused programmes before them. Through an analysis of three girl-centred campaigns, we illustrate how experts identify and diagnose girls’ problems and prescribe solutions that not only circumscribe girls’ futures, but are also counterproductive. We argue that even as campaigns try to integrate lessons learned from earlier gender and development initiatives, the critical reflection that a Žižekian approach promotes would better enable development actors to reformulate campaigns and fundamental campaign assumptions.

Versions of the same thinking are clearly now influencing some of the campaigns that have been critiqued too – take for example Katrine Marçal’s piece in the 2015 State of the World’s Girls report:

Girls and women are not an untapped economic resource in the world; their work is the invisible structure that keeps societies and economies together.

Things are shifting.

22/10/2015

Time for a gendered data revolution

Too many of the big numbers on gender inequality count the cost for GDP – rather than the costs imposed on women. Daphne Jayasinghe, Women’s Rights Policy Adviser at ActionAid UK, calls time.

Counting gender inequality – which big numbers?

It seems that when it comes to measuring the scale of women’s economic inequality, big numbers really count. Last month the McKinsey Global Institute published its finding that labour market gender inequality represents a $12 tn loss in global GDP. The IMF, the World Economic Forum, the OECD and others have described the “double dividends” of increasing numbers of women in the labour market thereby increasing GDP growth rates .

This analysis makes a striking, headline grabbing argument but what is the purpose? In spite of 1 in 3 women suffering violence and a gender pay gap as high as 30% in some countries, it seems that world leaders and decision makers need more convincing on the value of gender equality.

Gender equality is not just seen economically in the workplace. Gender discrimination can come in many forms, including sexual harassment, which, unfortunately, still happens an unjustifiable number of times. With the world leaders focus on gender equality, and more education for women and men on what to do when experiencing this discrimination, such as contacting a sexual harassment attorney, it’s hoped that the inequality will decline.

The fashion therefore is to promote women’s rights in relation to financial returns to the economy. To highlight the growth potential for economies of more women in the labour market, regardless of the exploitative or dangerous conditions they may be working in.

This analysis neglects the fact that neoliberal growth models rely on underpaid women workers as well as a workforce that is fed, clothed and brought up by the invisible cadre of unpaid women carers. Gender inequalities in the home and work place are by no means an inconvenience to global capitalism, they are a precondition for its success.

Counting the costs to women

ActionAid took steps to attach a big number to this debate which challenges this contradiction and measures losses to women themselves. We estimate that women globally could be USD$17 trillion better off each year if their pay and access to jobs were equal to that of men (USD$9 trillion in developing countris). We argue that women’s cheap labour and unpaid work is effectively subsidising the economy by this staggering amount – a result of gender discrimination and women’s economic inequality.

An analysis of this problem that makes a growth potential argument for gender equality neglects the role that economic policies can play in exacerbating inequalities. An assessment of the benefits of economic justice to women themselves and the economic drivers of inequality is vital.

Analysis of the legal gender barriers to the economy exist in the World Bank’s Women, business and the law project. In contrast, an understanding of the underlying but more pervasive social norms governing gender inequality is constrained by data shortages. For example, less than half of all countries measure unpaid care using time-use surveys.

Talkin bout a revolution

The Sustainable Development Goals agreed last month present an opportunity to improve gender data particularly since addressing discriminatory social norms and institutions has become a new development priority and features strongly across the goal on gender (SDG5) targets. Investments in countries’ capacity to gather data and attention to strong indicators to track the progress of achieving goals are imperative.

Such a gendered data revolution may help move the debate on women’s economic empowerment along from assessing what women could do for the economy towards what they are already doing – often with little recognition or reward.

Ask not what women could do for the economy – ask what they are already doing.

Author: Alex Cobham