World taxation system
In 2013, 11 countries in the EU's Eurozone established the European Union financial transaction tax, estimated to generate €35 billion per year.
[1] In 2012, a group of UN experts recommended that the United Nations adopt a FTT, estimating that the tax could bring $48-$250 billion in revenue, to be channelled to "fighting poverty, reversing growing inequality, and compensating those whose lives have been devastated by the enduring global economic crisis".
[5] On August 30, 2009, British Financial Services Authority chairman Lord Adair Turner said it was "ridiculous" to think he would propose a new tax on London and not the rest of the world.
[11][12] Castro also suggested that the United Nations be the administrator of this tax, stating the following: "May the tax suggested by Nobel Prize Laureate James Tobin be imposed in a reasonable and effective way on the current speculative operations accounting for trillions of US dollars every 24 hours, then the United Nations, which cannot go on depending on meager, inadequate, and belated donations and charities, will have one trillion US dollars annually to save and develop the world.
Given the seriousness and urgency of the existing problems, which have become a real hazard for the very survival of our species on the planet, that is what would actually be needed before it is too late.
"[13] The idea of a global wealth tax has been much discussed since the 2014 success of French economist Thomas Piketty's bestseller Capital in the Twenty-First Century.
Some 300 billion per year would also be necessary to limit global warming to +2 degrees Celsius and finance recovery from more frequent climate disasters.
Expensive but probably inevitable strategies to slow global warming include renewable energy research, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and reforestation (or preventing deforestation).
[26] Kristalina Georgieva, managing director of the IMF, has proposed an international carbon price floor,[27] noting that four fifths of global emissions remain unpriced.
Some research has suggested that such a proposal could be popular if the revenue generated by the tax is paid directly to citizens,[29] a payment known as a carbon dividend.
In 2023, research from CE Delft found that global shipping emissions could be cut by between a third to a half by 2030 without harming international trade.
[32] This was important since countries including China, India, Brazil and Saudi Arabia had expressed opposition to the tax, on the basis that it could put international trade at risk.
[35] In the US and other countries' nationalist movements, the idea of global taxation arouses ire in its perception by such circles as a potential infringement upon national sovereignty.
