Debate over a shake-up of the international corporate tax system has been ongoing for many years now, with few concrete outcomes (Figure 9). But this time looks different. The pandemic has had a profound effect on public finances around the world. And with governments scrabbling for additional revenues, corporate taxes are an attractive source.
While COVID-19 has presented the world with numerous challenges, it has also generated a conversation about how to reboot the global economy in its aftermath, and how to do so in a sustainable way. It has also highlighted the importance of preparing properly for risks of all kinds and the need for broader societal cooperation on achieving medium- and long-term goals.
The world is faced with major challenges that will shape the decades to come. Issues such as climate change, COVID-19 and rapid technological change affect us all and demand a collective response.
Launched last month,Global Britain in a Competitive Age: the Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy describes the UK government’s vision for the UK’s role in the world over the next decade and the actions we will take at home and with other countries to ensure that we are stronger, safer and more prosperous.
The Beirut port blast that claimed 178 lives, left over 6,500 injured and 300,000 homeless last August –the largest non-nuclear deflagration in history- was an avoidable tragedy. It was also virtually impossible to hide. The collapse of the Lebanese financial system could have also been avoided. It was, however, less visible. A series of measures set by the Lebanese Central Bank (Banque du Liban, BDL) and the government swept the inevitable default under a rug of financial engineering and the lira-to-dollar peg.
The world’s political and corporate leaders tend to agree that high intensity, training quality data frames (TQD) embedded through Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems are progressively permeating all aspects of our lives.[1] The current technologies, grounded on sophisticated algorithms and big data, have become of strategic importance for countries and for leading corporations worldwide.[2] The TQD has demonstrated to be one of the most transformative human-built forces in the current days.
The European Commission published its “European Green Energy Deal (EGD)” in December 2019 with the aim of reducing its CO2-emissions by 50-55 percent (instead of its previous goal of 40%) by 2030. The 27 EU member states have agreed to the EGD, a new climate law (codifying the new emission goal for 2030) and its “next generation fund”, which includes a €750bn economic recovery programme in the wake of the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic .
As the world progressively recognizes the need for “net zero” greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, renewed interest for hydrogen is surging. This need was implicit in the United Nations Framework Climate Change Convention’s ultimate objective, which calls for the stabilization of GHG atmospheric concentrations, though no agenda —and hence no standards— were set. The Paris Accord, by setting the target to limit the global temperature change to 2°C above pre-industrial levels, and striving to limit it to 1.5°C, has filled this void.
Hydrogen has drawn great enthusiasm in both the public and private sector, particularly in the aftermath of the COVID-19 health and economic crisis. Governments and companies have announced numerous ambitious hydrogen plans. Hydrogen is indeed considered to be a useful tool to achieve both national climate targets (especially in hard-to-abate sectors) and a key driver for the economic recovery.
The deadlock pitting the President of the Somali Republic, Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed, elected in 2017, against various political and clan interests as well as a number of federal states is far from being resolved. The elections scheduled for February 8, 2021 were never held and the president rules by fiat that is helped by the fractured nature of the opposition. The unsettled domestic political situation in Somalia leaves little room for optimism that the previously agreed upon September 17, 2020 electoral model will be implemented.
The globalization of the last two to three decades has been unbalanced – fast in the spread of finance, information, and communications technologies; slower in the liberalization of trade in goods and services; and lagging in the movement of people and the development of regulatory and other policy responses at the national and supranational levels.
