Symposium Posts

Rwanda envisions itself as the next Luxembourg or the next Singapore; a new financial center that will turn East Africa into an international power player and will service financial transactions throughout the African continent and beyond. While other financial centers are often accused of being tax havens, Rwanda is determined to avoid that label. It says the new hub, the Kigali International Financial Center (KIFC), will not allow business activity designed to avoid taxation. Details are forthcoming but Rwanda Finance Limited, the government entity that is developing the project, says all investments at KIFC must have a substantive business and economic purpose.

The post-COVID-19 era is likely to provide an interesting setting for the regulation of digital taxation given fiscal pressures and the eccentric existing unilateral application of digital taxation, as the world seeks to move towards a global consensus. In the meantime, revenue authorities, especially in developing countries, should approach unilateral measures carefully, to safeguard the success and continued growth of the digital services sector in their respective jurisdictions.

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.

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.

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 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.

The financial crisis of 2007-9 and the ensuing austerity put the political spotlight on the increasingly evident defects of the international framework for taxation of transnational corporations (TNCs). This attention will be heightened by the current COVID-19 crisis, which has led to even greater levels of state expenditure, including bailouts to business, and will bring an even sharper focus on taxation.