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Paper short abstract:

This paper approaches the African Group's resolution for the creation of a United Nations convention on international tax cooperation as a watershed moment for the redistribution of global corporate wealth, provides an overview of the distributive shortcomings of the OECD-led global tax reforms.

Paper long abstract:

A decade long, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), as the global center of tax expertise, coordinated to reform the global tax framework. Nonetheless, a taxonomy of these projects highlights how these projects fell short in creating more distributive justice for African countries, and in correcting the exclusion of these countries in standard-setting. Multinationals, along with their financial advisors, maintained the opportunity to plan their profits and losses according to the tax benefits associated with the different jurisdictions that are part of their global wealth chain, and the distributional bias of taxing rights largely remained unresolved. Yet, despite network and lock-in effects that for long cemented in the status quo in global tax governance, and steered African countries to OECD norms when trying to ring-fence corporate tax revenues against multinationals’ profits-shifting behavior, the African group successfully introduced a groundbreaking resolution to shift tax leadership from OECD- to UN-level, and to initiate an intergovernmental reform process. This study traces back how the Africa group created this tipping point for more tax justice by wielding international political economy shifts, and the covid-induced global fiscal emergency. From this perspective, we contribute to the literature on everyday international political economy, and incremental change.