FTC Discusses New Covid Bailout Tracker
May 6th, 2021
On April 27, the FTC hosted a high-level panel to discuss our new Covid Bailout Tracker, which revealed a set of staggering findings regarding governmental funding responses to the pandemic. The panel discussion, which can be viewed in its entirety here (and below), touched on a range of topics, from global minimum corporate taxes to those left behind by pandemic spending, and how the prioritization of the corporate sector has exacerbated existing gender, economic, and social divisions around the world.
Here are some of the highlights from the panelists, including key quotes and discussions during their presentations:
Matti Kohonen
FTC Director
“What needs to happen is a global minimum corporate tax—and that needs to be negotiated at the United Nations, so that the process can be discussed equitably. And this has to include things like offshore income.”
Hon. Irene Ovonji-Odida
Independent Commission for the Reform of International Corporate Taxation (ICRICT)
“The important thing is coordination in developing countries, in alliance with civil society in the Global North, because history shows that unless you have direct engagement of developing countries, change will be hard to come by.”
Madhav Tipu Ramachandran
Centre for Budget and Governance Accountability (CBGA India)
“Some accounting has been made for gender-specific responses [in India], but in terms of many of the social differences that define India—caste and class and tribe—there has not been a wider accounting for these groups.”
Chenai Mukumba
Policy Research and Advocacy Manager, Tax Justice Network Africa
“Kenya and Sierra Leone performed much worse compared to the other countries in the Tracker… In Kenya, 95% of the resources the government allocated in response to the pandemic went to corporations—and almost 0% to the informal sector.”
Ricardo Barrientos
Senior Economist, Central American Fiscal Studies Institute (ICEFI)
“The pandemic was like a switch, and the switch went off on Dec. 31, 2020 in countries like El Salvador and Guatemala. The governments just shut off social protection programs, even while there’s a third and fourth wave of the pandemic.”