Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
global poverty. Further, the Jubilee 2000 campaign argued that
US$160 billion per annum would be the cost of wiping out the global
South's unpayable debts.
Support for Tobin-style Taxes
James Tobin commented in 1995 that his initial idea 'did not make
much of a ripple. In fact, one could say that it sank like a rock. The
community of professional economists simply ignored it'. But in 1978
Tobin formalized his proposal, and in 1981, he was awarded the Nobel
Prize for Economics for his work on global taxation. Tobin formally
retired in 1988 and died in 2002 at the age of 84.
A Tobin-style tax was staunchly advocated in the mid-1990s by
President François Mitterand of France, shortly before his death. At
the start of the 2000s, the British Non-Government Organization, War
on Want ran a very strong and extensive campaign supporting the
introduction of a Tobin-style tax. At the same time, the Canadian par-
liament voted two-to-one in favour of introducing a Tobin tax.
Anti-globalists also find it relatively easy to align with Tobin's propos-
als as there is the strong argument that they would serve to dampen
down some of the most volatile and destabilizing aspects of financial
globalization.
However, it appears that, in general, the very politicians who espouse
globalization are those who dismiss out of hand a globalized tax to
tackle global world poverty. Thus, in 1995, the then Managing Director
of the International Monetary Fund, Michel Casessus is reported as
having commented that 'financing an attack on poverty should be left
to governments'. Notably, the possibility of global taxation was not even
mentioned in the United Kingdom Government's 2000 White Paper
dealing with the links between globalization and poverty reduction
(DFID, 2000b).
As a result of the financial crash of 2008 onwards, however, the idea
of a Tobin tax has been resurrected in a number of quarters. In 2009,
the approach was still being actively supported by the Governments of
France and Brazil. At the G20 Summit in Scotland in November 2009
the then British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, specifically raised the
idea of a transaction tax. In addition Angela Merkel, the Chancellor of
Germany, expressed her support for such a tax in December 2009.
241
Search WWH ::




Custom Search