By ensuring that highly digitalized businesses have nexus, these multinational corporations will cease to be “free-riders” leeching off the domestic taxpayers. It is also envisaged that this approach will ensure that highly digitalized businesses contribute to the social contracts of the societies from where they are making profits and whose public goods they are using for this purpose.

From a human rights perspective, ‘a new normal’ like COVID-19 should generate tremendous change.  It is important that, in the midst of this crisis, we keep an eye on the future and begin to forge a better Nigeria that works for our vulnerable and marginalised citizens. Although we are uncertain of how the post- COVID-19 world will look like, our aim is to come out of it stronger and united.

Owing to the combination of new data sources, evolving profit measurement and distribution norms, and multilateral cooperation, a GEP tax coordinated at the international level would have vastly larger prospects for building a new social contract for a post-pandemic world than any strictly domestic effort would.

The start of 2020 brought with it very perilous times in which countries around the world were forced to close their borders in a concerted effort to contain the deadly COVID-19 which claimed over 7 million lives around the world in the first half of the year. Tax bases dwindled due to job losses and a correspondent decrease in income and sales taxes. As many governments scramble to come up with inventive policies to rebalance the economy and raise tax revenue, this is a call to revisit the relevance of existing tax expenditure policies as they may become redundant in a post-pandemic era.

As evidence shows that tax incentives are not key drivers of investment and the opportunity cost of the incentives are high with dire implications for the health sector in Africa, it becomes pertinent for African countries to re-evaluate and reform their tax incentives frameworks. To achieve this, African countries need to ensure that all tax incentives are only considered after conducting a cost-benefit analysis of the potential impact of the incentives.

Distribution-based approaches require a normative principle that integrates distributive justice considerations in a way that the predominant normative framework does not. If taxing rights are to be allocated based on distributional consequences, broader attention to the role of international tax in perpetuating or reducing international inequality is warranted.

Our ethical conundrum as we think about issues of global distributive justice in the post-pandemic era is that social contract theory fails to provide an adequate framework for conceptualizing duties and obligations of international organizations to individuals, as opposed simply to their member states. The tension comes from the fact that people intuitively have a sense of justice which is offended by the manner in which power is wielded by those at the helm of the global financial order to place the interests of international organizations, banks, and multinational corporations over and above those of individual human beings, particularly those at the margins of the world economy.

The most relevant advantage of the Post-COVID Compulsory Loan would be the opportunity to amend the current Social Contract. The imposition of such a measure should be preceded by dialogue and negotiations to determine what sectors would contribute or benefits, earmarks, and public policies and measures.  Moreover, that may be a chance to increase trust and solidarity among stakeholders.

This blog aims to present some of the challenges being faced within Africa’s trade landscape and some of the workable policy instruments for overcoming these barriers in the digital post-COVID-19 age. In other words, the broad objective is to propose innovative solutions for enhancing post-COVID-19 economic resilience across businesses and households in a sustainable fashion.

This paper examines the intra-national dimensions of the fiscal social contract, with a focus on the experience in developing societies.  Helpfully, some more advanced societies have demonstrated a semblance of a positive relationship between taxation and the social contract, beyond the realm of mere potential or aspiration. Drawing guidance from such advanced societies, this paper also discusses what social, legal, and political pillars must be in place in society to support the framework of taxation from a social contractarian perspective.