The offshore world and the necessary global changes

The offshore world is one of the most serious manifestations of the global disarray that characterizes current times. It is imperative to dismantle dreaded tax havens within the context of a change in global financial and economic structures that humanity and its planet urgently need.

Main players responsible for the offshore world are “tax havens,” piously called “heaven” by the media, global banks, multinational corporations, large global auditing, tax, and specialized legal firms. Those are the enablers (facilitators) of the capital flight, tax evasion, and asset laundry by large corporations and the “global rich.”

In a context where multilateral agencies clearer and clearer show their biases and limitations, it is imperative that Southern countries adopt regional actions to tackle those challenges. Unfortunately, in many developing zones, such as Latin America, regional “defensive” actions are marginal today.

From a global perspective, the most relevant questions seem to be:

  • Crucial pending discussion—and the absence of pertinent global actions—regarding a new financial architecture, which must include global banks, fiscal havens, financing and behavioral rules of non-financial multinational corporations and the indispensable restructuring mechanisms for sovereign debts among its main chapters.
  • The creation of a global tax authority , at the level of United Nations, with the objective of promoting tax harmonization, developing global methods for controlling fiscal noncompliance and promoting an effective collaboration—and not just a “paper collaboration,” as it happens today—of the tax and customs administrations among nations and regions.
  • The adoption of global tributes, with a triple bottom line: fighting the rampant increase in socio-economic inequality in income and wealth; attending forced migrations; and mitigating the large damages resulting from climate change and biosphere deterioration, as well as financing necessary actions for protecting their victims.
  • The important and complex problem of reforming United Nations’ system to secure its effective democratization, a quite difficult and clearly essential political objective in a world of geopolitical asymmetries with multiple power centers.
  • The redesign of main multilateral economic institutions that requires questioning dominant economic dogmas.

Despite being imperative to address a process of non-traumatic global changes, hegemonic forces advance in other directions. Nationalist and xenophobic recklessness, rupture of countries’ blocks (Brexit, UNASUR) and social and political fragmentation within countries such as United States, United Kingdom, Spain, Ukraine, Iraq, and Syria weighs heavily.

This happens when global pressing problems as inequality, environmental crisis, organized crime, geopolitical antagonisms, demand consensus building, coordinated polices, and even new ways of global governance. That is, agreements in which the States must necessarily accommodate their interests in favor of the construction of the global common good. What is serious is that certain large powers advance in another direction, cheering and aggravating global conflicts, as Pope Francis denounces before public opinion dominated by passivity.

The Global State spoken about—among others—by “Pepe” Mujica, former president of Uruguay, can be an unavoidable path to take, sooner than later. This in turns presents diverse challenges, how can we achieve it? Can we use some reformed United Nations as a base? By proposing a multipolar global reconstruction that reverts a large previous period of global deterioration and disintegration? How many more perspectives must we consider and integrate? Humanity has no time to spare in searching for a better course in the construction of new institutions and ways of functioning of society and its economy.

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