Economist Joseph Stiglitz and and former Senegal Prime Minister Aminata Tour were among those calling for a radical overhaul of global taxation at the UN Finance for Development conference after the G7 backtracked on a key deal to get multinationals to pay more tax.
Stiglitz said that a G7 agreement to to water down the global minimum tax GMT - an internationally agreed-upon minimum rate of taxes that would be paid by large corporations - had been a bitter disappointment.
An OECD proposal on the global minimum tax, which set a rate of 15 on profits, received the support of 137 countries and was approved at the October 2021 Summit in Rome with an effective date of 2024.
However, in June the world's leading economies agreed a deal to spare the US's largest companies from the tax. The G7 agreed to a 'side-by-side solution" of taxation that would exempt US companies from some parts of the new global tax regime because of the taxes they pay in the US.
"For 14 years, we focused on this," Stiglitz told the conference, "trying to get a global minimum tax, and there were negotiations and agreements. It was difficult to get an agreement, but it was achieved.