Mariana Mazzucato writes:
Did
you see the image of Richard Branson, hiding with his friends and family in
his expensive wine cellar on his private Caribbean island,
tweeting that it felt like a fun slumber party from his youth? This while
Hurricane Irma tore through the houses and lives of others in the region,
offering a stark illustration of the way so-called natural events affect people
of different socioeconomic classes in radically different ways.
Architects and urban planners call this
“spatial inequality”. People living close to each other, whether in New York,
London or on a Caribbean island, will experience life completely differently
depending on the resources and opportunities they have available to them,
determined principally by their economic and class background.
Indeed,
modern inequality increasingly reveals itself through the divergence of income
and opportunities at a local level: the inequality between people living across
London postcodes can be almost as large as those between average incomes in
developed and developing countries. So a “natural” disaster (worsened by
climate change factors) becomes a socioeconomic one, in the same way that the
banking crisis, a manmade disaster, affected people differently.
Last week, after Hurricane Irma stormed the Caribbean,
Gaston Browne, the prime minister of Antigua and Barbuda, appealed to the
world, saying that 90% of buildings had been destroyed and 50% of the
population was homeless. He criticised those “irresponsible leaders” denying
climate change, when it was obvious to him that it was a key factor in the
severity of the recent hurricanes.
Now a second hurricane, Jose, is coming his
way and he is trying to force residents of Barbuda to evacuate. Similarly, the
French part of Saint Martin has been virtually destroyed, while two-thirds of
the population of Puerto Rico is without power and 17% without water. Although
it was slow to respond, the UK government has contributed £12m to the relief
effort in the Caribbean, including a naval ship.
Browne
called me in 2016 because he had read my book, The
Entrepreneurial State, and wanted to know more about the
various instruments that might be used to get back some value from investments
that the Antigua and Barbuda government had made in the tourism industry. And
would it be possible, he asked, for such future public investments to be
conditional on the tourism industry ploughing back profits into public funds
used for development? In this way, the taxpayers who propped up tourism could
also benefit from reinvestments into areas such as health, education and
transport for all.
While some may cynically dismiss this
question, raising concerns about corruption of public finances in poor
countries, the question Browne asked, even before the hurricane hit, was a good
one: how should those extracting value from a place contribute to it?
But the questions are complicated and perhaps
even uncomfortable for those asking them. The relief efforts needed are larger
than they should be due to how these countries have been starved of tax revenue
precisely because they have chosen to be tax havens.
The simpler question is to ask those “elites”
who save billions by using tax shelters in the Caribbean, and the Big 4
accounting firms that enable their transactions, to contribute to the relief
funds. The more difficult question is how to change the status quo and make
sure that these companies actually contribute to the resources they take
advantage of, both at home and abroad.
It’s more difficult because it requires
admitting that the governments offering tax shelters, which today might be
appealing for relief, are also extracting value from the governments of the
foreign companies they host. So, for example, the UK taxpayers pay for
infrastructure and education in the UK. British-based companies benefit from
that. If they then benefit from havens to avoid paying tax to the UK, the tax
shelters are, of course, a key part of the problem.
Clearly, a priority should be for companies,
operating in countries offering tax havens in British Overseas Territories and
the Commonwealth (or, indeed, elsewhere, such as Switzerland or Monte Carlo),
to be more transparent. As argued by the Tax Research UK, this would mean that
countries in the Overseas Territories should “provide free, online and publicly
accessible registers of all companies and trusts” located there.
A modest proposal would be for the countries to raise
money from the companies by increasing, for example, the charges they make for
offshore services, or by charging tax on the companies based in these places.
Governments need to make critical investments
that transform their societies in ways that create capacity, knowledge and
long-run growth. This will be expensive, but possible, if arrangements are put
in place so that those benefiting from the common resources also plough their
profits back into those very resources.
This, however, requires moving away
from the “us v them” mentality and recognising that the problem rests just as
much on the forces causing inequality at home as on the tensions between the
rich and poor countries. It’s more than just an argument about who has to pick
up the bill for the mess, disaster after disaster.
Mariana Mazzucato is professor in the
economics of innovation and public value, UCL.
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