News stories by Jomo Kwame Sundaram, page 29

KUALA LUMPUR, Sep 27 (IPS) - The United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) can only be achieved by 2030 with the political will to change international economic rules and mobilize resources needed for a massive public sector-led investment push to reinvigorate world economic progress sustainably, says UNCTAD's Trade and Development Report 2019 (TDR 2019).

KUALA LUMPUR and PENANG, Sep 17 (IPS) - Rapid financial globalization is due not only to financial innovations, but also to choices made by national policymakers, often with naïve expectations, trusting promoters' promises of steady net inflows of financial resources.

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, Sep 10 (IPS) - Smoking-related diseases are the major causes of premature death worldwide. Every year, six million smoking-related deaths are reported worldwide. If current smoking trends persist, 8 million deaths can be expected by 2030, of which four-fifths will occur in lower- and middle-income countries.

SYDNEY and KUALA LUMPUR, Sep 03 (IPS) - Large transnational corporations (TNCs) are widely believed to be paying little tax. The ease with which they avoid tax and the declining corporate tax rates over the decades have deprived developing countries of much needed revenues besides undermining public faith in the tax system.

SYDNEY and KUALA LUMPUR, Aug 27 (IPS) - The US-China trade war has flared up again less than two weeks after US President Donald Trump delayed new tariffs of US$160 billion on Chinese imports until December, purportedly to avoid harming the holiday shopping season.

SYDNEY and KUALA LUMPUR, Aug 20 (IPS) - Recently, Christine Lagarde, outgoing Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), argued that developing ‘countries need a seat at the table' to design rules governing international corporate taxation.

This acknowledges recent IMF findings that developing countries lose approximately USD200 billion in potential tax revenue yearly, about 1.3 per cent of their GDP, due to companies shifting profits to low-tax locations. Oxfam estimated in 2018 that extreme poverty could be eradicated for USD107 billion annually, i.e., about half the lost revenue.

SYDNEY and KUALA LUMPUR, Aug 12 (IPS) - The harmful effects of falling corporate tax rates have been acknowledged in a recent International Monetary Fund (IMF) research paper. This trend, since the early 1980s, has been especially detrimental for developing countries, which rely on direct taxation much more than developed economies.

SYDNEY and KUALA LUMPUR, Aug 07 (IPS) - According to their own internal evaluations, both the World Bank (WB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have huge credibility deficits due to the policy conditionalities and advice they have dispensed to developing countries in recent decades.

SYDNEY and KUALA LUMPUR, Jul 30 (IPS) - July 2019 saw the 75th anniversary of the historic conference of 44 countries held at the Bretton Woods (BW) resort in New Hampshire during July 1-22, 1944.

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, Jul 23 (IPS) - International financial institutions (IFIs) have typically imposed wide-ranging policy reforms – called ‘conditionalities' – in exchange for country governments to secure access to financial assistance.

While IFIs may demand anti-corruption policies, other IFI policy conditionalities, such as the privatization of state-owned enterprises (SOEs), can create new rentier opportunities, undermining government will and capacity to curb corruption.