 Llyfr angen, llunio'n gweld ffiylltio ond, ac mae'n ffiyll yn cael ei wneud, mae'n fawr yn roi, yn fawr, i chi. Mae'n fawr yn cyflei, yn fawr yn cael ei fawr yn gweithio'n cyd-rwynghau. Gweithio'r cyfrifoedd yn gweithio'n cyfrifoedd, ac yn dweud, mae'n gwybod i'r cyfrifoedd yn ymdweud yn gweithio'n cyfrifoedd. Mynd i'r gweithio'n cyfrifoedd yng nghydweithio'n cyfrifoedd felly we all feel comfortable about what we're paying and we feel comfortable about what other people are paying and we feel comfortable about what corporations are paying and we feel comfortable about where that tax revenue is ultimately going. If you are watching from home or in the office and you want to participate in the conversation we're going to have then I understand that you can access the slido system. There is a QR code that you can scan so please do that if you have the facilities to do that or you can access via hashtag weff 22 and I will try and get your questions in before we wrap up the panel. I'll have a go we've got a lot of ground to cover hopefully we will we will do that successfully and we will all leave the room as I like to say smarter than we came in so I want you to be involved as much as I want my panelists to be involved and I'll get an introduction to the panel in just a moment but I want to ask you a very quick quick question if you can just give me a show of hands I think this format works very well to find out what the mood of the room is and it helps the panel to understand the kind of audience that they're working with here so my question to you is this there was a huge fanfare last year around what we thought was going to be a global tax deal at 15% that was going to be implemented sooner rather than later that deal has not yet been implemented it represented a significant breakthrough in a multilateral approach to global taxation my question to you the audience is do you think that tax deal is going to get implemented can you raise your hand if you think the deal will ultimately get implemented okay not bad I think that's that's I would say that's a little over half of the room if you're watching from home let me ask the inverse who thinks that deal won't get implemented if you could raise your hand okay well that's less hands but that's still a significant number of hands so thank you very much for giving us a sense of where you sit on this whole conversation let me introduce our panel then because I think we're going to have a a terrific range of opinions if I might put it that way as to where taxes should be levied and ultimately who those taxes should benefit so let me start by just talking about our panel if I can introduce Gabriela Butcher thank you so much for being with us executive director at Oxfam International to end extreme inequality we must call on world leaders to end the era of tax havens that's a starting point that's a direct quote from you I think that lets the audience know what your perspective is at this stage Mateus Corman thank you for being with us OECD secretary general someone who's been a driving force behind the ideas that have pushed forward this this global tax agenda but you said agreement without implementation is de facto no agreement would you be pleased I think to see that a lot of the audience thinks that we will get implementation but we'll get your opinion on that in just a moment and just to keep us honest as we think about the fairness aspect versus the efficiency of taxation Stephanie Stancheva is with us professor of economics at Harvard University taxes politicized and impacts innovation both corporate and individual so there's clearly a balance as you point out that we need to achieve here where tax doesn't hold back progress so we'll get some of your opinions on that so thank you for being with us Mateus if I might start with you so I think this is important can you give us a sit rep a status update as to where you think we are now in the passage of this international tax agreement so firstly I mean it was a historic and very important deal that was reached in October last year but it was always going to be the case that after the principle agreement had been reached a lot of technical work had to be done on both pillars pillar one requires a multilateral instrument a multilateral treaty pillar two is essentially implemented through domestic legislation but required things like you know template legislation guidelines and so on all of the technical work in relation to pillar two from our end has been completed and it's now up to individual jurisdictions to proceed with implementation and we're very encouraged I mean as we meet here today EU finance ministers are meeting to discuss the directive that was put forward very swiftly about the European Commission to implement pillar two in Switzerland they're proceeding with the changes to the constitution in order to be able to implement a distil Canada the UK I mean all around the world countries are proceeding with the implementation and the truth is what once you have a critical mass of countries that impose a minimum level of corporate tax on profits generated in their jurisdictions then really it becomes very hard not to become part of it because I mean essentially you leave money on the table for other countries to collect if you don't align yourself to that global standard in relation to pillar one look I mean there's still some difficult discussions under why in relation to some of the technical aspects initially we had hoped to be in a position to finalize the multilateral agreement by the middle of this year we think that that is now more likely to be by the end of this year we we do hope though that in time for the G20 finance ministers meeting in Bali in July that we will have in principle agreement on all of the remaining technical aspects but then I mean there'll be the drafting and you know the dotting of the eyes and the crossing of the teeth but I mean look I'm quietly optimistic you know we deliberately set a very ambitious timeline for implementation initially to keep the pressure on and I mean we think that that has helped keep the momentum going but I suspect it's probably most likely now that we'll end up with a practical implementation from 2024 onwards the most obvious speed hump at the moment seems to be the mid-term elections and whether congress is returned republican um it does appear that if the republicans are in the house then as far as the americans are concerned it won't get passed can the europeans proceed without the americans on board given the taxing of american technology companies seem to be an important element of the deal look I'm obviously not going to get myself involved in commentary on the internal democratic processes of any country or the politics of it but what I would say is that rationally I mean I do believe that in the end self-interest does prevail and as far as pillar one is concerned I just can't see that large american multinationals would prefer to be on the receiving end of a proliferation of different tax regimes to try and address the real equity issues you know that we saw you know emerging around the world where large companies were not paying their fair share of tax in jurisdictions in which they generated profits now in relation to pillar two it just won't make sense for countries not to implement the arrangement if there is a sufficient number of countries around the world that have this minimum tax in place and are able to essentially collect the gap between between I mean any lower level of tax and the 15 percent so I mean I think that it will become self-perpetuating and I'm quietly confident that what is all said and done that rational thinking and self-interest will the pursuit of self-interest will prevail just before a broaden out the conversation the world has changed a lot since October of 2021 trust is in very short supply do you think this was an attempt at a multilateral deal too far given how the world's changed since then not at all I mean I think it was an example of a multilateralism working I mean some people will say you know it should have been it should have gone further some people will say it's not it's gone too far but but in the end there was a balance found that that was able to get 94 percent of the global economy around the consensus position and I mean I don't think it was has happened since then as awful as some of that is has got any connection to this particular multilateral agreement. Gabriella this this was all about coming up with or reimagining a global tax system was this ever the right deal in your opinion. I think reimagining a tax system which is also the name of our session is important we would say the imagination didn't go far enough but it was eight years of negotiations have you said it's complex negotiations and tax obviously it's a process that will take time and and as you say the world moves on and different factors coming to play and it was of course mostly you know the OECD paid a big part and of course OECD members there was an inclusive framework to include many other countries so it's a global tax deal but as you yourself are talking about some of the largest economies the idea would have been for it to be a truly fair and inclusive tax deal that would have really brought revenues to those least developed countries so if in pillar two the percentage the tax rate had been higher at 25 percent which was actually what was recommended by by groups of tax experts the world over and actually connects with the rates in some of the in some of the economies that are participating in the deal then 17 billion more dollars would be raised for the developing world for least developed countries and million countries then is the case now with the 15 percent so 15 percent is too low and and it's driven by by some of the tax havens that actually are pulling down so you know on the positive side of course it's closing loopholes on tax havens and as you said from my quote at the beginning that we believe that's extremely important and that's that's good but we we are worried that this will be a race to the bottom and further race to the bottom in terms of corporate taxation and and countries that have higher rates might go down and what we know from previous um you know critical moment experienced by the whole world in world war two taxes were raised significantly and corporate taxation in the US was very high and it would keep being very high for many years and that coincided with high growth periods so I'm sure professor can speak of that in greater detail but um there's a danger that we're not really using this important tool at this moment when we have so many competing crisis and really um increasing fiscal space for countries to be able to invest on on the most affected populations and those that are really at the at the bottom of of the society and and who need and in reality now we're talking about a hunger crisis with 193 million people in severe hunger situations in across the world but including in the rich world where many people are talking about skipping meals and not having enough to live so there needs to be resource mobilisation to deal with those situations those extreme situations that that we're leaving now so we believe that we need to continue in the discussion on the ambition for the the corporate tax deal and other taxes that hopefully we can also speak about but it's very important that we have this session here at the world economic forum um I think it's the only one on tax and I believe we should have more because you know people ask you know there's a lot of dialogue lots of discussions at at WEF it's important but then what happens in practice and something that can really change things is is tax and we you know from our perspective on addressing the growing and huge inequalities in the world progressive taxation is a tool at every country's disposal to really address inequality and of course it requires social contract rethinking and society and and what things mean for for different actors in society and why one should pay taxes and what the transparency levels need to be in order for people to trust and to be able to know that those investments in public services public goods education health everything that is actually going to increase living standards well-being is paid by by taxes let's be very very real about where we are though currently in the global economy we have just had two years of a pandemic that's that's reframed the way we think about international cooperation and actually a lot of good things came out of countries having to work together to tackle a global pandemic and yet we seem to have squandered that goodwill and that ability to work together as we're now what appears to be heading into a recession or a serious slowdown for the global economy is there any chance at all that governments are going to say our priority actually is not managing our domestic economic challenges it's raising taxation to provide help for those who are being left behind in other countries so I hate to put it brutally in those terms but you know if they didn't get the help then are they going to get the help now with so many more challenges for governments to manage it actually wasn't an issue of help or charity it was an issue of justice in terms of taxation in the countries where companies were doing their business and also other companies from those countries so it's not about help you know that's additional and there's other that would be other conversations that we could have about aid or or or debt cancellation which are also and should be very much on the agenda given the situation but it's about also disenfranchised and marginalized populations in in the global north in rich countries as well so taxation and mobilizing resources are required both in in advanced economies and across the global south um do we have a an appreciation of our tax systems being fair at this stage but also providing incentive that's a great question um the the lens through which I want to look at it is actually how how people think about this how citizens view this um you know one of one of my guiding principles has been that we need to listen more to people um we's you know academics but also business leaders policy makers we need to better understand how people have to reason and perceive these core economic policies and this is why in my lab at Harvard the social economics lab we ran large-scale surveys and experiments across different countries to try and really get into people's minds so to speak and see what are their perceptions attitude fairness concerns reasoning about policies like taxation and what we can see on taxation is that we care about a lot of things of course we care about the economic costs of taxes so what what taxes will do to economic activities and we citizens also care about our views of the government and whether we think the government can be trusted to handle taxes and waste the revenues or not but what turns out to be the most important concern that sort of swamps everything else is what we think about who wins who loses from a given tax change and how fair we think that is that dominates other concerns so to put it very simply people don't support different levels of taxes whether on people or corporations because they have different views about what the economic costs of these taxes are they support different levels of taxes because they have very different views of who the winners and losers are and how fair that is and someone who thinks tax of high economic costs may still want high taxes because they care a lot about inequality and so we economists are at this intersection where we can say which policies are economically efficient but then we have to also take into account which policies are perceived to be fair and I can tell you about two policies that are sort of in this conjunction among others one is actually the global something like the global tax deal to actually get at multinational taxation and the other is about actually improving tax enforcement overall even domestically and happy to talk more about those yeah no please carry on I think we're fascinated so on the on the taxing of multinationals it is truly both an efficiency issue and a fairness issue on the efficiency side you know there's a lot of untapped revenues there that are are just not raised by any government and then there's issues of certainty and you know stability for businesses which currently are facing a sort of labyrinth of either double taxes or non taxes and constant changes and it's also a big fairness issue because people think very strongly that there's winners and losers from globalization and you know are willing to support openness and globalization many studies show that if they think that the losers will be compensated fairly and companies large companies especially are definitely perceived to be among the big winners from globalization and COVID has only exacerbated that view because there's this idea that companies get helped when times are tough by governments through various policies and so should be paying into the the common pool the taxes that they have to pay when times are good so it is this mix of efficiency you know concerns and also fairness concerns and the other is on the enforcement improving tax administration itself within countries there's a lot of fiscal leakages and there's a big fairness concern that everyone should pay the taxes they're supposed to pay whatever the level low or high and there's a lot of evidence and also perception among citizens that tax evasion and avoidance doesn't happen equally across the income distribution and equally across companies of different sizes and here there's a lot to do to leverage actually the new data analytics tools that we have big data methods also based on research that is progressing so fast and use of real-time data to really improve tax enforcement but also very simply actually simply giving funds to the severely underfunded and over committed tax administrations in many countries to simply be able to also recruit train and retain talent and so that's another area where you know the efficiency concerns and fairness concerns actually really coincide very well those are two examples yeah no that's fascinating but but one of the challenges then clearly is transparency as we know going forward and it's a point that that you've raised does it make sense for us then to be thinking more seriously about a global asset register or or indeed moving forward the UN tax convention where we focus much more clearly on reporting and transparency well at the OECD level i mean we do have a global forum that is focused precisely on this tax transparency issue and in recent years we've made a lot of progress in terms of exchange of information between jurisdictions where where that was not the case before to really help facilitate that that enforcement and and you know we're also very focused on supporting developing economies in terms of their capability that their capability development in terms of rising their own source revenue i mean so there's a whole range of areas in this space that that we are active to improve transparency to improve the level of exchange of information and to help and to support a developing economies in particular in terms of the wide eye are able to rise their own source revenue but how do we overcome the tax haven challenge i mean there's been a lot of movement on it but do we do we ultimately is this about public shaming do you embarrass companies and billionaires and countries into ultimately improving transparency well i mean over the last 10 years or so over the last 10 plus years through the bias erosion profit shifting the BEPS action plan i mean we've addressed a lot of these issues like i mean you know in in the end obviously we are committed to a system where the rule of law prevails and and you you work within appropriate democratic rules of law by by systems but we need we do need to ensure that the tax administrations around the world have the proper tools and the proper information and access to the proper information to enforce their tax laws so i agree and what has happened has been obviously globalization happening at speed in fact tax the tax systems haven't been developed at the same pace so tax systems have been national level while corporations are increasingly complex intertwined global entities so this corporate tax deal goes some way into that but of course the levels of complexity are so high and and the difficulty of taxation is is also very high so there we have a lot of work to do in that area but in the terms of of transparency and tax havens we have a long way to go on on wealth from individuals so we've been talking a lot from corporate taxation but we really we we advocate and and there's been a launch of doing an asset registry of of individuals and to have transparency and in fact it should be in the interest of all those who have acquired even very large amounts and in fact it's known and those lists are known by everyone those who have acquired large amounts of wealth legally and you know at the moment because of the levels of secrecy and and lack of transparency all those assets are combined in secrecy so it's in the interest of all to know and that's the beginning and in fact when we talk about wealth taxation of individuals we talk it's very small percentages really that we're talking about and the countries that have wealth taxes implemented 1% 2% taxation very small for that individual but given the the had has enormous impact for for society and it redresses the balance that at the moment taxation is mostly focused on consumption which is not a progressive tax at all and on income and of course people who have salaries we get taxed regardless and but not all countries are as progressive as they could be in income taxation so that would be if you the more progressive you are the more you can have an impact on reducing inequality and raising revenues for programs that help social protection health education so so the issue is there's only at the in 2017 the figure was only 4% of total tax revenue came from wealth taxation so in terms of reimagining tax systems we think there's huge scope there to work on mobilising resources that are needed both in in rich economies and in the global south absolutely urgently given all the crisis that we have and we know it takes a long time to to develop these things but these conversations need to happen at national level several countries have them they used to be more countries that had them and and we need to go back and probably you can talk about what the trade-offs are but we see mostly positives in in this past including the transparency and bringing society together and and building trust by by also and and solidarity it's a very active conversation we know and Janet Yellen is talking a lot about taxes on unrealised gains that that billionaires and millionaires hold what does the academic study tell us about the effect of levying those taxes on the wealthy when it comes to what progress then society makes and how those people use their finances going forward because at the moment a lot of them just relocate to another country with a different tax base these are very difficult questions because actually you know at the scale of history there haven't been that many wealth taxes that we can that we can study and they're not necessarily in comparable places or in historic periods that we can compare to today but I do think that this global tax agreement is very much in this spirit that is broader of taxing capital better at the scale of the world that is a very big challenge because capital is so mobile it's easy to you know hide in in various places and so I think the developments that go a little bit hand in hand with that such as the automatic exchange of information between countries are really critical to actually allow better enforcement and sort of lower the cost of actually taxing capital and I do think this is particularly crucial after COVID or during COVID as we're still in it because COVID has really exacerbated inequalities along pretty much all dimensions not just across income distribution but also between genders between children from different backgrounds very starkly between different sectors between different regions within countries and there is definitely you know existing fractures that have been amplified and deepened and so the urgency somehow is even you know is even more pressing than before to address these but of the taxes that could be levied I mean obviously we can talk about wealth taxes but there are taxes on consumption as you pointed out inheritance taxes or taxes on all sorts of things what are most efficient or which are most efficient and actually least negative in terms of the kind of innovation that you've been focused on if I could answer that there would be no more public economics field this is definitely a quite quite complex topic it is more about for each of these type of taxes that we have actually improving the way they're levied and it's not necessarily about taxing more depends on the context but really about taxing better all of these taxes have a lot of inefficiency embedded in them currently and so I mentioned a few related to general tax enforcement or multinational companies or on the taxation of capital and so I think that is that is something unambiguous that we can say to improve that Mateus I mean we saw Jeff Bezos push back against President Biden's connection of taxation and inflation does the fact that we're now seeing these conversations played out in the public domain suggests that actually any legislation in the United States that puts higher taxes on billionaires is dead in the water well look I mean I think the bides on taxation are not new they've always it's always been thus and they've always been a central part of the political discourse I mean what I would say clearly governments need to be able to rise the necessary revenue to fund the public services their populations require and expect ideally they should do so in a way that is most efficient least distorting in the economy and is fair and equitable the question then is how can you you know how can you have the Goldilocks approach to taxation that gives you a taxes that are most efficient least distorting and fair and equitable and seen as being fair and equitable and look you know as far as wealth taxes are concerned I mean we haven't seen a huge history of success on the efficiency and least distorting front when it comes to those I mean they're inevitably difficult to administer and don't necessarily rise that much revenue it's the evidence it's true that on the perceived fairness and equity front and in terms of the politics of it it's sort of attractive but in terms of what it actually achieves in substance it's not it's not that attractive what we would say from an OECD point of view if you really want to have the most efficient least distorting why of I guess taxing wealth property taxes are probably the most efficient least distorting why to do so but a pure wealth tax I mean the history around the world is that they're not necessarily a successful way of achieving the objective the intended objective yeah so I think we are calling this wave a turning point in history and we are in so many crises happening at the same time I think as humanity we haven't experienced that so we are in a moment of really having to use our imagination to the maximum and and what has worked or not worked in the past we we need to really think and and what billionaires have wanted or not to do you know at the moment we're talking about you know the the survival of of our of our humanity in the planet so you can accumulate as much wealth as you want but if everything ends around you then then it doesn't make much sense so in our report out yesterday we talked we called it profiting from pain the two years of the pandemic have been you know really bonanza for for lots of billionaires and there's been a new billionaire every 30 hours in the last two years and now in 2022 around one million people are falling into extreme poverty in at the same rate because of still the pandemic effects the conflict in Ukraine of course inflation everything that we know hunger the effects of climate are visible so I was in Somalia six weeks ago and you know there are people who are used to to coping with very very tough conditions but the level of impact of these droughts now are breaking all the coping mechanisms and and we could see hundreds of thousands of people dying at the moment people are dying one person every 48 seconds in Somalia Kenya and Ethiopia the Horn of Africa so this is unfortunately only the beginning of that because we're not raising enough money the the UN has launched an appeal for six billion only 10% is funded we have Yemen Syria and the Sahel Afghanistan all these places are in hunger crisis and it's growing so we really need to move and and mobilize resources and whether it's the heart or the brain needs to be moved to to think of where and and as I said there's huge scope in wealth taxation it's difficult it's been tried and in some countries it is it works and small percentages make huge difference so we calculated 2% and going up to 5% it obviously means sacrifices but we cannot continue in this situation you know I think as humanity in which some people are sacrificing and giving up basically their life and others are thinking whether you know these amounts that are being accumulated are not you cannot spend them in several lifetimes no um we can open this up for questions so would anybody like to start us off here um do we have a microphone could we take a microphone to to the person here and directed at the person you'd like to answer the question yeah hi um is this on have another go yeah now we can hear you you can hear me okay great uh Mehreen Khan from The Times in London a question for the Secretary General of the OECD um we spoke about the maybe the some of the problems that the tax agreement might have in the US but it might not also have um the easiest run in the EU particularly because some parts of this will need a unanimous agreement um we've already seen countries like uh Hungary blocking any deals that might require unanimity when it comes to energy embargoes is this something that could spill over and also threaten the progress of the deal inside the European Union thank you well thank you for the question I mean I'm quietly optimistic I mean the European Commission acted very swiftly in presenting a directive to implement pillar two um I mean you know it's it's public it's public knowledge that Poland has been expressing some concerns quite publicly the EU finance ministers are meeting to die and I'm quite hopeful and optimistic that there will be a resolution and the European Union will implement the pillar two as a great and as fast pillar one is concerned of course there is still some technical work on the why that involves all of the parties to the agreement it's got a question from behind you say it Ricardo Hausmann from Harvard University um I would like to ask the panel especially the secretary general if this new accord is going to make it easier for emerging and developing countries to tax global income and not just the territorial income um by increasing the amount of information sharing so that it would be practical for them effective for them to be able to tax the income of their citizens abroad well when the short answer is from the eyes it is yes I mean we are I mean this this deal levels the playing field it reduces the pressure on developing economies to offer wise full tax incentives and and and indeed I mean developing countries are very much part of our global transparency and exchange of information approach and we are also putting in a dedicated effort to help develop a capacity to improve the level of own source revenue collection including in the circumstances that you that you mentioned anybody else want to come in on that point so I think that was the original intention to really end the profit shifting and there's a lot of still you know my understanding is it is still a lot of profit shifting will continue and there's large amounts coming out of Africa so we talk about helping but in in the first place it has been coming out in terms of tax that is going going to the developed world to the to the yeah but I mean once this deal is implement that it removes the incentive for businesses to shift profits out of those jurisdictions because I mean why take why take the image the negative image effect in order to pay the same tax elsewhere I mean the sort of incentive to structure your affairs to avoid tax in those countries is removed and in fact the incentive for those countries to offer wise full tax incentives or tax holidays or the like is also removed so you know are there still other issues to address as we move forward sure but I think it's a significant step forward Stephanie we've got a question on on slider that I think would be would be good for you to address actually and the question is what can be done to improve public awareness of the deal and its implications for equity fairness and transparency it does seem to me that understanding and awareness are very important when it comes to people voluntarily wanting to pay tax do you think the publication and publicity surrounding this global tax deal has been adequate to encourage citizens to embrace the idea that's really a great question and I think it's the materials are obviously obviously great for economists and for policy makers I do think an outreach would be extremely helpful because it is not an easy to understand you know framework and particularly what Mattias mentioned this self-reinforcing property it has built in which is if a sufficient number of countries move into it it creates incentives for everyone else to try and join too and it has this self-reinforcing sort of virtuous cycle instead of the current perhaps more vicious race to the bottom cycle and that would be something that is very useful I think to explain and to much more intuitively you know say which countries are going to see actually a shift in revenues to them both based on the changes in taxing rights and because of the minimum tax the two pillars and so I think you know broader outreach and education would actually be I think very helpful to help people understand this well that's ball in your court secretary general have you failed in your obligation to publicize and demonstrate where the revenue benefits will be found well I mean look we do our best and it's you know I think there's always more education that can be provided there always more consultations and more information can be provided and it's never I mean it's a it's a never ending finishing line when you will never quite and reach the finish to that but I mean we're making a lot of efforts on that front and we will continue to do that and just back to to where we might actually see the revenue generated at the moment the talk last year was of 150 billion additional dollars in revenue as a result of the 136 countries that we're going to sign up to this if we have a deep recession what number are we talking about in reality and what does the past tell us about what that figure might look like Stephanie you know I wouldn't be able to tell you what the figure would look like with a recession maybe Matias has run different scenarios here but obviously there's lots of contingencies here both in terms of the economic situation and also which parts of this deal will be implemented and by how many countries right do you have any data well our assessment is that pillar one will rise more than 100 billion dollars us additional and that pillar two will rise more than 150 billion dollars a year additional but I mean you know there's there's a very high level estimates you know obviously all other things being equal if you have lower growth and less you know lower profits you will end up with less revenue but I mean it's it's very hard to assess that with any degree of granularity if I say maybe briefly looking into countries some of the ones that haven't signed their reasons why they haven't also is because in fact they'll end up losing out and they currently have taxes that allow them to to raise for example in Kenya they they can tax 89 tech companies but under pillar one now they will only be able to tax 11 companies so there are countries that are actually losing out regardless of any economic downturns. Got a question here. Chris Giles from the Financial Times a question for Professor Stan Shaver the Secretary General declined to answer your question earlier about what would happen if there was a Republican Congress for both pillar two and pillar one. Could you tell us what you think will happen in the U.S. in terms of U.S. implementation on the tax deal if we get a change in Congress. I won't be able to make predictions on that but I think something that is quite really quite interesting in this agreement relative to other multinational agreements is what I already mentioned is that it is not necessary for all countries to agree in the first place for this to be positive actually. It is OK if a sufficient number of countries for instance if the EU goes ahead to create already incentives for companies from other countries to change their behavior and it will normally have this you know further incentive effect of other countries to jump in in order to not leave revenues on the table and so I think this reinforcing effect is actually something quite quite peculiar which is not always the case in multinational agreements so my hope is that more countries will participate in this but if only a few countries go ahead we will still I think see some improvement in the multinational tax system. And just to remind everyone of my answer to the question I think my answer was that irrespective of who is in Congress in my view it's in the rational self-interest of the United States to be part of this deal. I mean if the United States was not part of pillar one the risk is that major US companies operating globally will be on the receiving end of a proliferation of different tax regimes and the inefficiency that comes from that double taxation risk and all of the other potential issues much better for them to be operating in a globally consistent framework and in relation to pillar two precisely as it's just been said it's just not rationally in the interest of any country not to be part of the deal once a sufficient number of countries are in it because essentially all you're doing is leaving money on the table for other countries to collect from your companies so that doesn't I mean I just can't from where I sit I can't imagine that any country or any side of politics in any country would make a judgment that would put themselves at that sort of disadvantage and just finally in relation to pillar one proliferation of unilateral measures from around the world and also the related stride tensions that come with it so I mean I think I believe that irrespective of who is in majority in Congress who is in government this is manifestly in the US interest and in the interests of US business David Rubinstein co-founder of the Carlisle group said on my panel yesterday not even the Democrats will vote for it after the midterms do you think he's wrong well I have a more optimistic view so he's wrong well I have a different view so he's right he's entitled to his opinion he's entitled to his opinion I mean only the truth is right like only the future will tell my view is more optimistic but you know I respect him greatly and you know he's of course entitled to his views we've got a couple of minutes left I just want to wrap up with a question about specific taxes and we know the IMF has talked about a global solidarity tax to reduce social inequality we also know that governments have focused on specific transition taxes as a way of encouraging people to feel better about the tax they're paying because it has a specific purpose just as we wrap up here just a comment from each of you perhaps as to whether this approach actually works and whether it's something that we should pursue at a national level to try and achieve perhaps some of the goals that you're aiming for so I think it should be not only my aims I hope where there will be our collective aims because they are in the interest of the collective I think the most immediate discussion on tax that is being had in several countries is windfall taxes and there is again opportunity now because of the situation in some sectors the energy sector food sector others that have profited greatly in the last two years and the need is also great so I would say focusing there and of course that with all the technicalities that are required but we don't have time here but it's it's a one-off important thing also there's solidarity taxes that have been introduced Argentina did it and they taxed the wealthiest in Argentina in order to have money to respond to the COVID in that context but they didn't have any fiscal space so that can be done and then there can be a societal discussion about wealth taxation I think we must not really we need to continue with the ambition it's not enough to to stop as where we are now when full taxes on the energy companies good idea well look I mean you know we have said if there if there is you know I mean I have said publicly if there is a temporary period during which certain segments of the energy market are making windfall taxes and there is a need to provide a fiscal support to low-income households in order to cushion the effect and that could be a neat temporary way of of addressing the challenge but in a in a general sense though looking at the tax system structurally I mean I think it's important really for us to keep in mind that yes governments need to rise revenue of course to fund the public services their populations require that they should do so in a way that is as efficient as possible least distorting in the economy and which is and is seen as being fair and equitable and if we continue to think about it in that frame then I mean I think that there's a lot of sensible policy reform that we can pursue professor let me talk super briefly about environmental taxes one type of specific taxes because again through this lens of how people reason about them and what we can see across countries is that people are very aware of climate change and care a lot about it and its disastrous consequences but what they really care about as well is that policies put in place are progressive and don't disproportionately hit lower income people and there's a perception that current policies are actually quite regressive and so convincing people that climate change is disastrous etc is not the way to actually increase support for environmental policies but rather having progressive policies to counter it and letting people also understand that just to give an example support for a carbon tax is actually much higher if people know that the revenues are going to be rebated to the most vulnerable households or reinvested in equipment to help households become greener rather than for instance redistributed equally or giving tax breaks more generally terrific we've got to wrap it up unfortunately we've run out of time here but can we just show our appreciation for our panel and thank you very much everybody for being