Financial Transparency Coalition

I’m pretty confident you won’t have read it, but this week's edition of Transfer Pricing Week saw Vodafone’s tax director, John Connors, publicly enter the debate regarding Christian Aid’s campaign for country-by-country reporting. For some time now we have been talking with Vodafone about tax and development and trying to convince it that it should get on top of this crucial issue. And Vodafone has acknowledged that we have ‘had some interesting discussions.’ This week, that conversation went public – and this is something we welcome. We are campaigning for transparency after all. Connors said in the article that ‘country-by-country reporting is a little misguided’ suggesting...

While over 100 million children never get the opportunity to go to school, developing countries lose more money through tax dodging than they receive in aid. Take action now to end tax haven secrecy. Join us in calling to demand tax justice at the G20 summit in France in November 2011.

Economists have some funny ideas. Often these ideas are controversial. Sometimes these ideas are brilliant and intuitive. Other times these ideas are brilliant, intuitive, and just plain wrong. It’s often difficult to know the difference between the two. It usually takes another economist to figure it out. Economists have long held the (brilliant, intuitive, and possibly wrong) belief that people make the best decisions for themselves. This is called rational choice theory (or, simply, rationality) and it underlies almost all economic theory. This confuses a lot of non-economists who understand “rationality” to mean “sane” or “making good choices.” Rationality to...

Classification is important—in any discipline. Classification of symptoms helps doctors determine the correct treatment for patients. It helps us pick out the right book in a library, settle on the appropriate sentence for a convict, and compare species of plants. For similar reasons, researchers collect countries into groups based on a variety of metrics that define prosperity. These systems allow us to compare gains in development, to better understand how gains in development can be achieved, and determine appropriate aid packages. It isn’t always easy because there isn’t any one parameter that successfully defines wealth or prosperity.