More justice for developing countries in the international tax system – Sabine Laudage is working on this issue during her research stay at the Institute for Development Studies in Brighton.
From 8 November to 3 December 2021, Sabine Laudage, researcher at the German Development Institute / Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik (DIE) in the project on Fair Globalisation, is a visiting fellow at the Institute for Development Studies (IDS) in Brighton, southern England. There, she conducts research on the effects of international tax rules on developing countries, supervised by the interdisciplinary team of the International Center for Tax and Development (ICTD).
The international tax system has fallen into disrepute as it provides loopholes for multinational corporations to pay little or no taxes. As a result, governments around the world lose around 200 billion US dollars in corporate tax revenue every year. Efforts by the Base Erosion and Profit Shifting Project of the OECD and G20 to close the loopholes brought progress but still no satisfactory solution. The global tax reform passed in October 2021 is also far from creating justice for all countries in the international tax system.
In her doctoral thesis, Sabine Laudage calculates the effects of international tax rules on the mobilisation of domestic revenues in developing countries. At the ICTD, she exchanges ideas with several researchers on the topic and can thus gain new knowledge for her doctoral thesis, which she is writing in the field of economics at the University of Münster. Furthermore, she has already presented parts of her research in a research seminar in Brighton.
In addition to the global perspective, researchers at the ICTD also focus on the national perspective of tax systems in developing countries. Various projects deal, for example, with the digitisation of tax authorities, capacity building, and informality. This emphasises the importance that when designing international tax rules, the requirements and contexts of less developed countries must always be taken into account.
