Covid-19 — will tax justice finally triumph?

Description

The link between tax avoidance and the health system is clearly illustrated in an interesting piece of research published last September by the World Health Organization (WHO). Here, Bernadette Ann-Marie O’Hare compared estimates of international corporate tax avoidance and domestic government health expenditure for 2013 from 100 countries. She showed that revenues lost from corporate tax avoidance were bigger than government health expenditure. If the revenues lost to tax avoidance were allocated to the health sector, ‘the annual government health expenditure could increase from US$8 to US$24 per capita in low-income countries and from US$54 to US$91 per capita in lower-middle-income countries. In other words, if governments were to recover taxes lost due to tax avoidance, they could fund public hospitals, improve the quality of health care, as well as provide the necessary means to health workers to do their work under good conditions.