Mistreated
The tax treaties that are depriving the world’s poorest countries of vital revenue
Women and girls in the world’s poorest countries need strong and effective public services such as schools and hospitals. To pay for this, these countries urgently need to collect more tax revenue. However, countries are at risk of losing corporate tax revenue through the little-known mechanism of binding tax treaties between countries. In many cases, these facilitate tax avoidance by corporations, draw money away from governments and the services that tax revenue should support, and transfer money from the poorest countries to the richest, thus exacerbating inequality.
Our report, Mistreated, outlines the issue, highlighting the most restrictive tax treaties and calling for political action to redress the balance. It also marks the release of the ActionAid tax treaties dataset* – original research that makes these tax deals made with some of the world’s poorest countries easily comparable transparent.
* To cite the dataset : Hearson, M. 2016. 'The ActionAid Tax Treaties Dataset'. Brighton: Institute of Development Studies. http://ictd.ac/datasets/action-aid-tax-treaties-datasets