Financial Transparency Coalition

This blog post is the first in a two-part blog series. In this post, I observe several of the year’s biggest global trends and their relationship to financial transparency. In the second post, I will examine this year’s progress and momentum in global policy on transparency issues. Rising Income Inequality In the United States, policymakers across the political spectrum have become increasingly vocal about the rising income inequality. They include Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) who called this the “issue of our time,” Senator Paul Rand (R- KY) who admitted income inequality is a problem, and Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) and...

The Tax Justice Network, a coordinating member of the FTC, just released the latest edition of their newsletter, Tax Justice Focus. This edition focuses on the theme of tax justice and human rights, perhaps the fastest-growing area of interest in the rapidly expanding global tax justice community. Click here for the full edition of Tax Justice Focus, the Human Rights edition. You can also access the individual articles below.

After a decade of high growth in sub-Saharan Africa, it is time to ask: who benefits? Certainly growth has been accompanied by some poverty reduction and some progress in health and education. But advances are inadequate compared to the wealth created. Worse still, income inequality is rising in too many countries. A new report by Tax Justice Network-Africa and Christian Aid investigates income inequality in eight sub-Saharan African countries and asks whether their tax systems are working to narrow the gap between rich and poor.

The Financial Transparency Coalition issues play an important role in the context of global income inequality. By discouraging tax evasion and corruption among the world’s wealthy individuals and corporations, the FTC recommendations could play an important role in alleviating egregious and dangerous income disparity. When we talk about global inequality, we are usually referring to one of two issues: (1) inequality between nations and regions and (2) inequality between individuals. Inequality between nations usually refers to the huge disparities between the average incomes of people in different countries. The other kind of inequality, that between individuals, refers to the overwhelming...