Sustainable Development Goals

There is no doubt that solving this pandemic is the most pressing challenge of our time. This is not a zero sum game. Below, I elaborate on the four points for effective global solidarity to tackle the pandemic.

The Mozambican case of odious debt is an illustration of several similar cases around the world whereby consultants from multinational corporations identify development countries with something of value, such as minerals, and persuade the authorities of these countries to secretly take on huge development loans with banks. In most cases, the money never reaches the countries. Rather, the money is transferred directly from the banks to contractors and the countries are then left with massive debts. Resources and companies from developing countries are given as collaterals for these loans. Therefore, the resources that countries should use to invest in development are transferred to service these odious debts. In summary, this is what happened in Mozambique.

Owing to the combination of new data sources, evolving profit measurement and distribution norms, and multilateral cooperation, a GEP tax coordinated at the international level would have vastly larger prospects for building a new social contract for a post-pandemic world than any strictly domestic effort would.

Distribution-based approaches require a normative principle that integrates distributive justice considerations in a way that the predominant normative framework does not. If taxing rights are to be allocated based on distributional consequences, broader attention to the role of international tax in perpetuating or reducing international inequality is warranted.

There is no room for experts from affluent countries to swoop in and tell less affluent countries what they ought to do to reform their tax systems. Instead, experts from wealthy countries need to take tax policy spillovers seriously and correct the systemic flaws in the international tax regime that make it hard for some countries to tax effectively. This is, in my view, crucial to forming an acceptable international social contract going forward.

The Namibia Law Journal invites contributions from authors with regard to the impact of Covid-19 on the Namibian society and developed countries, from legal and socio-economic perspectives, regarding the effects that the global pandemic will have on such countries’ developmental aspirations and the realisation of their Sustainable Developmental Goals (SDGs). 

This contribution starts with two observations, both reflecting mainstream approaches to international economic law, international institutional law and public international law more generally. First, international development law, defined as a branch of International Economic Law (IEL) that sets out “the rights and duties of states and other actors in the development process” seldom receives the same degree of research and teaching focus typically dedicated to branches such as international trade, investment and monetary regulation – as a cursory review of the tables of contents of prominent IEL textbooks and research handbooks illustrates. Second, the same can be said about multilateral development banks (MDBs) and their development-finance operations.

Currently, the world finds itself at a crisis point. The global health pandemic caused by COVID-19 has drastically changed the way we live, how we run our economies and even, how we teach and research IEL. In the post-COVID world, old rules and games may not apply any more. The scholarly interventions presented in the IEL Collective symposia offers tools for a new, pragmatic internationalism – one based on critical reflection, methodological diversity and contributes towards the development of a more holistic landscape of scholarship on law and the governance of the global economy.

The current international, regional and national architecture of Intellectual Property law confers privileges to foreign transitional interest blocks in order to profit from patents by extending, trademarks, copyrights and so on for longer periods of time. This legal enclave diminishes the possibility of developing technologies, including diagnostics, medicines, vaccines and other medical supplies vital to treating patients infected by COVID-19 and it hampers efforts to distribute them in a timely manner to all the countries currently affected by the pandemic. However, the creative elements of a new global system are emerging now, one characterized by coordination between WIPO, WTO and WHO.

LDCs are inadequately equipped to manage the socio-economic impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic; these countries have not even effectively curbed environmental pollution yet. The sustainable development goals strategies did not envisage such a pandemic and this is causing many governments to lose sight of how to manage their economic regressions. The national governments and international community therefore have to be more vigilant and proactive in ensuring that the battered global economy stabilizes after the pandemic.