WUNRN
CESR – Center for Economic & Social Justice
http://www.cesr.org/article.php?id=1710
FISCAL POLICY – TAX JUSTICE – GENDER EQUALITY – HUMAN RIGHTS
WOMEN’S RIGHTS &
REVENUES: WE CAN’T Have GENDER EQUALITY WITHOUT FISCAL JUSTICE
Kate Donald is Director of the
Human Rights in Development program at CESR, and the co-founder & blog
editor of Women for Tax Justice.
Tax justice campaigns have been
steadily building
steam in recent years, while global campaigns like
Oxfam’s Even It Up have captured and further
catalyzed outrage about growing economic inequality. Of course, the link
between inequality and tax is far from coincidental or tangential, tax policy
being a crucial determinant of socio-economic disparities.
Photo: Charles Miller
In recent
times it has become clear that fair taxation is crucial to the cause of women’s
rights and equality.
At CESR, we address the four crucial functions
of tax from a human rights perspective: resourcing, redistribution,
representation and re-pricing. Each is potentially a powerful channel for
tackling inequality: the first in terms of providing further resources for
accessible and high-quality public services, the second in redistributing
income and wealth more fairly, and the third by increasing the voice and power
of disadvantaged people in fiscal and political affairs, while also
strengthening the accountability of those in power. Fourthly, shaping positive
and negative incentives through re-pricing goods and services and correcting
market distortions can be a powerful tool to instill more substantive equality.
By and large, tax justice campaigners have
focused on the impact of tax on income inequality,
But, there is a growing movement of researchers, advocates and activists mobilizing to highlight the ways in which tax policy can obstruct
women’s equality and human rights. Indeed, tax can be a very significant
constraint on progress towards gender equality (as recognized even by the Beijing Declaration and
Platform for Action 20 years ago). In most
countries women are overrepresented among the poor, and there is a solid body
of research showing that the weakening of the fiscal state over the last 30
years has in turn unfairly disadvantaged lower
income groups
Tax also affects women in gender-specific
ways. Women tend to rely more on public services,
which are depleted and underfunded after years of fiscal austerity. Regressive
taxation regimes with high rates of VAT or sales tax impact women’s incomes
particularly harshly, as they tend to be the ones buying food, clothes and
other basic goods for the household. Regimes with
joint taxation for spouses or partners tend to disadvantage the lowest earners
(in the case of heterosexual couples, usually the woman) and disincentivize women’s work, while reinforcing stereotypes about a woman’s income being secondary
to that of the male breadwinner, and to her unpaid care work. Meanwhile, wages
are often taxed at a higher rate than wealth and the incomes of multi-national
corporations and high-net worth individuals are allowed to escape overseas to
tax havens. Men are overwhelmingly more likely to accumulate wealth, own
property, and be corporate CEOs and shareholders - and as such women are again
prejudiced by a broken and biased system.
Engagement with fiscal policy and how it can
help or hinder gender equality is therefore spreading within the feminist
movement (driven by pioneering work by organizations such as DAWN, AWID and CWGL, and national projects such as the UK’s Women’s Budget Group) while tax justice campaigners are increasingly keen to explore the
gendered impacts of tax. Meanwhile, it is imperative that the human rights
community engages more operationally with tax from a human rights and gender
perspective.
CESR is seeking to bolster the work of all these
groups, bringing to bear our experience of using human rights as a powerful
lens and set of tools to interrogate fiscal policy. Human rights is not only an
authoritative shared normative language, but also an empowering mode of interrogating policy truisms and power
hierarchies; not to mention a set of legal obligations with accompanying
accountability mechanisms. The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of
Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) - to take just one legally
binding (and almost universally-ratified) international human rights treaty -
can be a very revealing lens through
which to analyze economic policies and their impact on women. This exercise prompts us to ask if, for example, a given tax policy or
system is contributing towards the “full development and advancement of women”;
upholding women’s right to “free choice of profession and employment””, or
contributing towards the “elimination of prejudices” based on “stereotyped
roles for men and women”.
In order to delve into such questions and
inspire further interrogation, CESR recently ran a ‘Tax Justice for Gender Equality’ workshop alongside Christian Aid, ActionAid, and the Center for Human
Rights and Global Justice (NYU). The event was designed to be a
capacity-building space for those women’s rights advocates and activists who
are not so familiar with tax policies and their impacts, or how to articulate
these issues in their advocacy. Participants from several different continents
discussed the relationship between taxation and unpaid care work, economic
inequality, the right to work, access to essential services, and global
poverty. We unpacked VAT and country-by-country reporting, tax havens and human
rights instruments, illicit financial flows and indirect bias in income tax. Our
discussions also explored how specific human rights standards and mechanisms
can be used as tools for evaluating and designing just tax policies, and how to
influence current global policymaking processes - in particular the post-2015 sustainable development agenda and the Financing for Development negotiations.
As the nascent movement to link tax and human
rights gathers force, it is crucial to ensure we better understand and reflect
the different ways in which women (and other specific populations) are impacted
by and experience tax. In the human rights community, we know all too well that
inequalities intersect and compound in myriad ways. Income inequality - at both
a global and national scale - may be the most obvious form of inequality which
fiscal policy can affect, but to overlook gender is to do women’s human rights
a disservice……
AWID - http://www.awid.org/eng/News-Analysis/Friday-Files/Tax-Justice-and-Human-Rights
TAX
JUSTICE – WOMEN – HUMAN RIGHTS
May 1, 2015 - Representatives from human rights
organisations, and tax justice experts and activists met this week in Lima,
Peru to strategise about ‘Advancing Tax Justice through Human Rights’[i]. AWIDs Ana Ines Abelenda was there to explore
the linkages between taxation policies and social and gender justice by using
human rights instruments and commitments as a powerful tool.
By Ana Ines Abelenda and Susan Tolmay
Tax systems are important fiscal tools for
directing the processes of economic growth and are used to redistribute wealth
and encourage socially acceptable behaviour by re-pricing certain goods and
services (e.g. excises on cigarettes and alcohol). Mobilizing public domestic
resources through tax revenue is becoming increasingly difficult in a context
marked by extreme tax competition to attract corporate investments, austerity
measures and illicit financial flows. This is has a negative impact
governments’ efforts to ensure social protection floors are in place to protect
and fulfill women’s human rights and gender equality.
Neoliberal austerity measures are
drastically reducing policy space for national governments to design
progressive taxation schemes. Tax abuses, illicit financial flows, tax evasion
and the weight of debt payments from developing to developed countries reduces
revenue available to national governments for development and fulfillment of
human rights, including women’s rights. A recent study
conducted by Eurodad found that developing countries are losing
twice the amount of money they earn because of issues like tax evasion, profits
taken out by foreign investors and interest repayments on debt.
Trends and current
landscape on tax systems vis a vis gender justice
Fiscal policies are not gender neutral. In
fact, tax systems hinge on certain concepts and assumptions that are themselves
gendered (e.g. ‘breadwinner,’ ‘household,). These assumptions tend to put women
at a disadvantage reinforcing stereotypes about women’s income being secondary
to that of the male breadwinner, and does not recognize nor help to distribute
unpaid care work.
The current “race to the bottom” in which
tax competition among developing countries takes place to attract corporate and
foreign direct investment is having a negative impact on government budgets
needed to finance the advancement of women’s rights. Decrease in government
revenues often lead to cuts in social expenditure in key areas such as health,
education, public jobs, care work, with disproportionate impact on women who
often shoulder a greater unpaid care burden.
Responses to the financial crisis in 2008 highlight the catastrophic and
inequitable impacts of austerity measures, including those of fiscal policy
aiming to lower public expenditure, on the poorest and most vulnerable. Cuts in
vital social protection sectors such as health care, education, unemployment
insurance, pensions, care systems have undermined the lives of people and
signify a regression and neglect in the fulfillment of human rights. Women have
become the safety nets of last resort to sustain their families and social
structure.
Poorly designed fiscal policies undermine
progress towards gender equality. But policy makers are yet to make the clear
connection, even with increasing concerns that tax systems are biased against
women, and, that contemporary tax reforms may increase the incidence of
taxation on the poorest women while failing to generate enough revenue to fund
the programmes needed to improve these women’s lives.
Current trends in tax reform indicate a
big shift away from taxing income to taxing consumption, through value-added
taxes, which is significant given gendered consumption patterns – i.e. women
take care of a larger proportion of household expenditure and thus the extent
to which the value-added tax (VAT) is applied to basic consumption goods such
as food affects women disproportionately. Policy makers should carefully consider
the set of goods and services that should be domestically zero-rated or
exempted.
Assessment of impacts of fiscal policy
—with data disaggregated by sex and social group—is essential to ensuring these
and other economic policies do no harm but rather even have positive impacts
across the board, including on women of diverse backgrounds.
Gender-responsive
budgeting
Gender budgeting requires that governments
invest more in those sectors that will have direct positive impact on access to
basic needs. Gender budgeting should be constructed and implemented in ways
that respect, protect and fulfill human rights for all, and guarantee the
democratic participation of stakeholders, including women’s rights movements.
Gender budgeting also has much more potential for success where finance
ministers are involved in policy decisions.
At the same time it is important to bear
in mind that gender budgeting alone will not achieve gender equality and
women’s rights. Financing at large including matters such as policy coherence
for development, need to contribute towards this end.
Another key issue is that allocation of
money to gender equality is not enough. Governments need to track how the money
is spent and CSOs must demand accountability. In addition for gender-responsive
budgeting to be effective there needs to be political will and Government
commitment to gender equality through the allocation of resources to their
national policies, programs, laws; gender analysis capacity development of
those working on budgeting; proper systems in place to allocate money
efficiently and effectively and participation by women’s rights organisations.
Some proposed
strategies
Governments should establish robust
mechanisms for taxing the corporate sector and reforming the financial structure
through progressive redistributive measures. For example, incorporating
financial transaction taxes which, according to estimates, could raise as much
as $650 billion and at the same time regulate markets that tend to have a
destabilizing trading practices.
But taxing the rich 1%, though crucial to
raise revenues, still only addresses the consequences of inequality, not the
root causes that enabled such an outrageous concentration of wealth in hands of
the few to occur in the first place. Challenging the lack of regulation of the
growing financial economy that allows big companies and rich individuals to pay
minimal or no tax is essential to addressing social inequality and human
rights.
There needs to be a shift from indirect
taxes to direct taxes will serve as a more progressive and equitable system of
taxation. Governments should refrain from attaching additional taxes to certain
goods and services e.g in form of VAT.
Greater international tax cooperation is
needed, something that could be achieved by upgrading the UN Tax Committee so
that governments can coordinate national taxation regimes to ensure corporate
tax rates deal with trade mispricing and other tactics used by multinational
corporations to avoid paying taxes.
Accountability and transparency are
fundamental to evaluate if pledged resources are actually disbursed and where
they are going and there are some existing experiences with tracking funding
allocations. For example, GENDERNET in collaboration with UN Women developed the Global
Partnership indicator on gender equality that “provides data on whether
governments track allocations for gender equality and make this information
public. It is an entry point for ensuring that domestic resource allocations
benefit women and men equally”[ii].
The use of CEDAW, the Convention on the
Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) can be a very
important tool to put fiscal policies to account for their impact on women. It
could integrate mechanisms to track funding for women’s rights as part of
reviewing the duty of member States to finance the realization of women’s
rights.
In a nutshell, strengthening the role of human rights frameworks in
fiscal policy decision-making is key. Human right instruments and mechanisms
should be the basis for ethical and accountability frameworks, challenging the
current narrow focus on efficiency and growth that has only taken us to the
dismantling of social protection floors with dire consequences for human
rights, especially women’s rights.