The UN Tax Convention

Finally, A Level Playing Field For Tax?

International Tax Planning

Regulation and Policy

Alex Cobham

Tax Justice Network, Oxford

In 2025, for the first time ever, every country will be able to participate in a process to set international tax rules. The negotiation of a UN framework convention on international tax cooperation has the potential to deliver a truly level playing field for all. With the Republicans’ clean sweep in the US elections, this long overdue triumph of multilateralism will now take place against a backdrop of aggressive unilateralism. But that might just provide the catalyst for the world to achieve a fair and ambitious outcome.

A Century Of International Tax Misgovernance

There has never been a level playing field, or anything close, in the history of international tax. We can think of three main phases to that history.

First, the ‘pre-governance’ phase in the centuries during which European empires dominated the planet. The only significant international aspects of tax in this phase were the ways in which tax was used as a channel for extractive exploitation – whether that took the form of charter companies like the British East India Company raising taxes (so that India effectively paid for the wholesale exportation of its own goods to the UK), or colonial authorities taxing local populations to pay for the costs of their own occupation (and sending anything extra back to the metropole).