Our Demands

We welcome the historic vote of the Africa Group’s UNGA Second Committee proposal in November 2023, and the UNGA decision to start intergovernmental negotiations towards a UN Framework Convention on International Tax Cooperation. This becomes even more urgent considering the nature and size of the digital economy and the increasing importance of e-commerce. UN DESA’s 2022 World Economic Situation and Prospects (WESP) report noted that the tax deal of the OECD Inclusive Framework will only benefit a small number of developed countries and that developing countries stand to lose out. Unless the failures of the international tax system are urgently addressed, countries around the world will continue to lose billions of public revenue dollars. This will increase the already unsustainable debt levels, worsen income and wealth inequality and undermine 
governments’ abilities to respond to the crisis, while also decreasing the public revenue base of developing countries. We therefore call all member states to support and engage in the upcoming UN process to deliver a UN Framework Convention on International Tax Cooperation.

UN member states should elaborate a multilateral agreement for a coordinated and permanent termination of InvestorState Dispute Settlement (ISDS) mechanisms that has empowered transnational corporations to sue governments in confidential tribunals on a range of issues including debt, tax and increasingly climate action. The 2022 IPCC report also flagged that ISDS risks blocking the phase out of fossil fuels.

with a mandate to examine needed international institutional innovations, including in the UN, required to correct and avert the adverse impacts of CRAs on international finance. In addition to looking at the adequacy of CRAs rating methodologies and possible bias in its implementation that undermine developing countries’ access to capital markets, CRA regulation would also need to focus on issues such as conflicts of interest, promoting competition to avoid quasi monopolistic market dynamics, and tackling excessive reliance of investors on ratings. Such a commission should also further study proposals such as establishing an international public credit rating agency at the UN. 

The COVID-19 pandemic provided a stark reminder of the importance of universal, timely, affordable, gender-responsive, high quality and accessible public services, as well as sustainable infrastructure. The inadequacy of development models that prioritize private profit and financialization to fulfill public needs, goes against human rights and enables excessive profiteering out of humanitarian emergencies and disasters has been fully exposed. 

As the ambitions of Agenda 2030 are further away, it is vital to make sure that the long-standing commitments to delivering international development assistance, including ensuring quality and effectiveness, are realized and to secure commitments to make up for more than 50 years of broken commitments, in addition to future targets for ODA flows. Donors should not divert ODA from addressing standing challenges and should rather mobilize additional resources to cope with new threats to sustainable development, including those originating from pandemics or global geopolitical crises. Concessional finance plays a key role in supporting countries in the Global South on their way back from the multiple and interconnected crises without incurring additional debt burden and without being tied to any conditionality. Broader vulnerability indicators must be considered beyond the per capita income in order to include middle income countries in development financing programs. Donors should not report as ODA any item that serves to inflate the aid actually provided, including the COVID- 19 excess vaccine doses donations, so as not to reward unfair practices that led to massive vaccine appropriation by rich countries in the first place.

Past financial crises not only represented a massive failure in macroeconomic and financial regulation but also exposed the significant vacuum in governance over financial actors, particularly non-banking actors. Yet, the asset management industry has grown exponentially since the last crisis, now featuring a higher degree of interconnections between financial institutions and generating an even higher systemic risk. It is therefore essential for UN Member States to assess the current financial "non-system" and undertake decisive steps towards financial regulation, including regulation and supervision of Credit Rating Agencies, a global regulatory framework for the asset management industry and a global agreement on the importance of capital account management.

there is an urgent need for broad, transparent, inclusive, accessible, and participatory deliberations on the current and potential impacts of these technologies on the environment, the labor market, tax policy, livelihoods and society. The global COVID-19 pandemic exposed the extent and further exacerbated the digital divide – the ever-widening gap in access to digital technology and infrastructures between the North and South, between men and women across the world, and between urban and rural communities within countries. There remains a huge vacuum in Member State-led 
governance of digital technologies that needs to be addressed with a sense of urgency to assert the mandate of inclusive multilateral institutions over corporate interests and to protect human rights. Governance of digitalization is key in curbing the widening digital divide and contribute towards the vision of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development to Leave No One Behind.

National and international support for investments in sectors with the greatest potential for creating more and better jobs (such as climate transition in energy, infrastructure, transport, heavy industry, agriculture, and construction, along with care and digital services) are essential to fix the broken labor market. Investments in care, capacity building and training, creating millions of new decent jobs, also offer the opportunity to formalize current informal care jobs and to support women to participate in other areas of the economy. Moreover, the global pandemic illustrates more drastically than ever before the importance of ensuring adequate fiscal space to support the extension of social protection systems to ensure universal coverage through social protection floors, in line with ILO standards. We stress the need for access to essential health care for all and income security and to maintain these services even in times of crisis.