Integrated Review: Development Aid

Viscount Waverley Excerpts

Wednesday 28th April 2021 Grand Committee

[Viscount Waverley (CB)]

My Lords, fiscal criteria and for what purpose we apportion two key elements of aid assistance go to the core of my remarks. Humanitarian ghastliness in Yemen, Syria or Iraq is apart from strategies for countries in poverty. This enforced reduction could be an opportunity.

Making trade work for everyone must become our mantra. As a bonus for doing so, emigration would be stopped in its tracks. The UK must lead by example and move the dial on the world stage.

What we never debate is what we are prepared to give up. Governments should consider what is needed and what is not working. Throwing cash at the problem for our new-look world is not the solution.

Resolving the major contributory factor to trade reform by failing to implement the WTO Doha round offers a lifetime opportunity. Reductions in government spending on subsidies and agribusiness, which were held hostage by the United States and the European Union to the detriment of developing economies, ended the Doha round. That was regrettable.

First, we must prioritise the issues that erode developing countries’ tax bases as a means of improving the overall effectiveness of international development and tax co-operation. International tax rules, especially manipulation by multinational companies to avoid paying their appropriate level share of taxes to the right quarter, should be prioritised, with a taxed-at-source mechanism.

Secondly, Governments should support broader economic goals with market reforms, the promotion of private sector investment and industrialisation by revamping incentives and development agreements for a broad range of countries. Major benefits would come from freeing economies with a package of zero-tariff regimes that would create wealth in developing and impoverished nations, and much-needed employment. This would provide a range of new participants to the supply-chain cycle, providing new sources of supply from the developing world.