 And so firstly let me then welcome our first presenter is Christian von Haldenwang. He's a senior researcher and project lead at the German Institute of Development and Sustainability and he works on taxation, decentralization and urban transformation. So welcome Christian, the stage is yours. Thanks Kyle, thanks to the organizers for inviting me. I know that I have now the tough job to keep you awake for the next 18 minutes at least right after lunch. So I will see in your eyes the degree to which I succeed or fail in this endeavor. But I'm talking about something that I personally really like. I just said over lunch for me this is the most important line of activities that I have done in my personal career and I'm in the field not since yesterday but for some years. And it's about the global tax expenditure database and the line of activities many fold activities that we are developing on top of a database. So first of all tax expenditures it's even for tax people it's not always a very familiar term. Right because quite often we talk about tax incentives or we talk about tax exemptions or we talk about tax breaks and so on. But tax expenditures is a more technical term. We use it in order to denote the whole universe of these kinds of preferential treatments and we use the term because we think that in fact it links to the expenditure side also and it should be closely linked to budget debates in the country. So there's also a normative background if you want in using the term tax expenditures. So we are talking about exemptions deductions credits deferrals reduced tax rates and governments use those to promote all kinds of policy objectives above all very often investments attraction of foreign direct investment or promotion of growth and promotion of anti poverty measures through access to basic goods environmentally friendly behavior sometimes also incentivized by tax expenditures. Crisis responses think of COVID-19 the pandemic and the many tax expenditures our governments used in order to have a first reaction crisis reaction. So this is not peanuts. This is not a minor issue although it has not been discussed much in the past. We see that all in all the global average of reported revenue for gone is 3.7% of GDP and almost a quarter of those tax revenues that are actually collected. So we are talking about huge amounts of money and we know that what we have in our database is not the whole story because not even the best reports present revenue for gone estimates for the whole range of tax expenditures that are used. We are talking about Canada, the Netherlands or Morocco for instance to take a country from the so-called global south. Even those countries that are pretty comprehensive in their reporting are not able and do not include estimates for the whole range. So there is underreporting. Our ambition and I'm talking about my institute IDOS or about the small team that I'm leading there but also about the Council on Economic Policies, a Swiss based think tank that is partnering with us in this endeavor. Agustin Redonda is the lead there. Our ambition is to contribute to a rational use of tax expenditures worldwide. We have a clear policy ambition, a policy orientation. So this is the first global database that covers the whole universe of tax expenditures. It's completely free of charge available online on our website. You can download the full dataset. You can construct your own queries and download the data according to those queries. It's very user friendly also for researchers. And the idea is to improve transparency, deepen analysis and foster policy debates on the costs and benefits of tax expenditures. Now what does the GTAT gather? We gather official data that is publicly available. This is a first limitation because we do not take data from third sources for several reasons. One reason being that we cannot control the quality of that data and we cannot control the quality of government data either. But at least if it's lousy, we can say it's the government's task and they provide lousy data. So this is much easier than looking at third party data. And also we think it's the obligation of governments to be transparent about the tax expenditures they use. Another limitation is that we follow country specific benchmarks. Tax expenditures by definition are deviations from a benchmark tax system. And the benchmark tax system is always the national tax system and it's always there's variation between countries with regard to that. So some countries for instance provide tax expenditures on fuel taxes in order to support energy intensive industries. Other governments do not charge fuel taxes at all. In principle this would be a 100% tax expenditure on fuel taxes but it's of course not reported as such because the tax does not exist. Just to make you see that there are differences with regard to benchmark. In principle it would be nice to have a universal benchmark against which all tax expenditures worldwide are being assessed. But we are certainly not in a position to impose such a universal benchmark. Nobody actually at this moment is. So we have to accept the national benchmarks which is of course a certain, as I said, a certain limit with regard to comparability of the quantitative figures. Also I should mention we only have national level, central government level data here because even in countries such as Canada for instance it's a very federal country with provides tax expenditures at sub-national levels. Reporting at sub-national levels is so diverse and so heterogeneous that we cannot use this with a reasonable amount of effort. We'd have information on revenue for gone, on the tax type, the tax expenditure type, on beneficiaries, policy objective, legal reference, sunset clauses and so on. Cover the period from 1990 to the present, although it's fair to say that before 2005 it was only a small number of mostly high income countries that produced such reports. And we cover all 218 jurisdictions that are in the World Bank list of jurisdictions. And of those we see that 105 countries issue such reports. 113 countries, more than a half, does not issue public reports. And we are pretty sure about this because we have a very careful search process. This doesn't mean that it's necessarily perfect. There might be, you know, some cases that slip our attention but we are pretty confident that we have the universe of countries that report in our database. More than 24,000 provisions, more than 114,000 revenue for gone estimates are there. When we look at trends, first there is good news. We see that the number of countries that produce reports has been increasing since the 1990s and in particular after 2005 we see that numbers are going up. We see that in recent years it kind of levels off a little bit and in the most recent years we see lower levels. But we also know that countries sometimes report with a certain delay. We also know that countries that issue their first reports do this covering normally up to five years or even more sometimes. So we expect the numbers to remain or at this high level or perhaps even increase in the future, which of course would be a good thing because transparency, as I said, is important. I already mentioned 3.7%, 23.5%. Interesting to see how this plays out in different country income groups. We see that in terms of revenue for gone as a percent of GDP, this percentage grows with country income groups. But we also see, and this of course has to do with lower tax ratios in poorer countries, that with regards to the share of tax revenue, numbers can also be highly relevant, for instance, in low income countries. This is an interesting graph because it shows that the composition of tax expenditures in our database changes over time. So we have a high amount of taxes on income or tax expenditures granted on taxes on income in the first years and a growing amount of tax expenditures on goods and services in the more recent years. And this has to do with changes in the universe of countries that report on tax expenditures. We have more low and middle income countries reporting, and this means that lower participation of high income countries in the universe. And we see that the share of revenue for gone from taxes on goods and services in high income countries is less than a half of the share in low and middle income countries. So this explains how this graphs, the behavior of this graph. We see that countries use tax expenditures differently. So when we look at, for instance, beneficiaries, we see that in high income countries, more than half of tax expenditures, we are talking about revenue for gone figures, are granted to households, actually. High income countries use tax expenditures as a tool for welfare policy, actually. Think about the earned income tax credit in the US as a very important distributional policy tool. In the poorer countries, we see that a much larger share is given to businesses, or it is not clear, or it's a combined measure, such as, for instance, certain import VAT exemptions. When we look at types of tax expenditure, again, the picture is different. According to income groups, we see that the richer countries make use of a broader portfolio of the types of tax expenditures that includes, for instance, deferrals and credits that are more difficult to administer also, and to monitor. Whereas in the poorer countries, we see that the overwhelming part of tax expenditures are granted as exemptions. Now, quality of tax expenditure reporting, of course, is an issue, and we see a huge variation here as well. So almost all countries or all countries report on the tax type upon which a tax expenditure is granted and on the estimation method, which is usually the revenue for gone method. But when we look at, especially at policy objective or legal reference, we see that the reports are much poorer, or that less countries actually have reports that include the information. And when you think about what is this information used for, what should I do? The idea, of course, is to use this information to engage in public debate and political debate about the sense or lack of sense of individual tax expenditures, not of the overall universe of tax expenditures. You always discuss individual tax expenditures, sometimes even with regard to specific companies, multilateral companies, right? So in order to do that in a meaningful way, you need this information at the provision level in the reports. And this is even more important with regard to data. So we see that this is 106 countries in total. We have kicked out one country recently because the information was deemed not to be good enough. But when we look at those 106, we see that only 58 of them provide disaggregate data, actually, and the other 48 only aggregate data. Again, aggregate data is not totally useless, but if you want to discuss individual tax expenditures, you need the disaggregated data at the provision level. We see that many countries only have reported on tax expenditures for a few years, which of course is important if you want to look at tendency trends over time. Although this picture is improving also, so there are more countries reporting for more years. The variation in the quality of reporting is not a low-income country-specific issue. Actually, our work on the database was motivated by Switzerland, which is a notorious nonreporter, even though they have the legal obligation to issue such reports. We see that only 42 countries worldwide publish reports with provision-level data on a regular basis. But we also see that even in OECD and G20 and European Union member states, there are countries that do not report or that do not report with the necessary detail. Just to give you an idea of Africa, we see 22 countries do not report on tax expenditures, only three report provision-level data regularly, but the picture improves. We see more and more countries in Africa issuing their first reports, so there is a dynamic there that is positive. Now, to finish, I would like to embed this in a broader overview over what we do. So the GTET is of course the cornerstone of our work or has been in the past, but we have been engaged in a lot more activities. I will talk about this strange thing GTETI in a minute, but we are working on the evaluation of tax expenditures with the United Nations Economic Commission of Latin America, because one thing is estimating revenue for gone. A much more demanding thing and much less frequently done is evaluation of tax expenditures looking at the achievement of their stated policy objectives and the cost and benefit relation of them. And there are only few countries that do this on a regular basis and based on an evaluation agenda. Then we are going to produce tax expenditure country reports that will provide more information on individual countries. We are engaged together with the Addis Tax Initiative in a series of workshops in Africa and Asia where peer learning and peer exchange and network building between ministries of finance, revenue authorities and parliaments is at the core of our activities there. We are going to have workshop. Kyle will be there in Accra in I think in less than two weeks from now. So we are doing also a lot of policy advice research as you see is there, but it's not our primary work at this moment, although we have some research papers in the pipeline. And now the GTETI. The GTETI is the Global Tax Expenditures Transparency Index which will be launched in October in Zurich in 9th of October. And it will be a hybrid event. You will have the opportunity to take part online if you want. You can approach me and I can send you the link to do that. And this is the first comparative assessment of reporting covering countries worldwide. It builds on the data of the GTET although it also uses in part other data. And it provides a systematic framework to rank countries according to the regularity quality and scope of their tax expenditure reports. And I should always say of their reports. It's not about the quality of their use of tax expenditures or the quality of the tax expenditures they use, but only it's about the reporting that is then scored and put on an index. But the idea is of course to encourage governments to do more to improve the transparency of their use of tax expenditures and to take this out of the shadow and put it into the spotlight where it should be. Thank you.