The Uncounted. Alex Cobham
Ford Foundation (where Rakesh Rajani was catalytic, for me personally as well as for TJN) and Norad. I’m grateful too for the insightful comments of Maria Moreno and two anonymous referees, the support of George Owers, Julia Davies and Sarah Dancy at Polity, Catherine Cobham and David Cobham, and the expert input of Dr Julia Prest in translating some seventeenth-century French, to Brooke Harrington and STEP for assistance with a reference, to Save the Children for permission to use and adapt figures to all those who have helped me find data, including Mikelyn Meyers and Cordell Golden, and to all the audiences everywhere who have ever sat through bits of this and improved the arguments and evidence with their comments and criticisms.
The late Joel Joffe was Nelson Mandela’s lawyer during the Rivonia Trial, and described by Mandela as ‘the General behind the scenes in our defence’. In a lifetime fighting the created injustices of apartheid and poverty, Joel was a champion of tax justice, and the Joffe Charitable Trust provided crucial financial support to the Tax Justice Network at a vital time. As someone who stood up to be counted, time and again, I hope Joel would have appreciated how the core argument of The Uncounted runs from the injustices of marginalization and oppression to those of tax abuse and exploitation – and offers some ways to start fighting back against them all.
Abbreviations
ACSAmerican Community SurveyBEPSBase Erosion and Profit ShiftingCEMDConfidential Enquiry into Maternal Deaths (UK)CIPOLDConfidential Inquiry into Premature Deaths of People with Learning Disabilities (UK)CPICorruption Perceptions IndexCRISECentre for Research into Inequality, Security and EthnicityDFIDDepartment for International Development (UK)DGEDirectoria Geral de Estatística (Brazil)DTP3diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussisECOSOCEconomic and Social Council (UN)EITIExtractive Industries Transparency InitiativeEUEuropean UnionFATCAForeign Account Tax Compliance Act (US)FSIFinancial Secrecy IndexGAVIGlobal Alliance on Vaccinations and ImmunizationsGDPgross domestic productGFIGlobal Financial IntegrityGRDGovernment Revenue DatasetGRIDGroup Inequalities DatabaseICIJInternational Consortium of Investigative JournalistsICRICTIndependent Commission for the Reform of International Corporate TaxationICTDInternational Centre for Tax and DevelopmentIFFillicit financial flowsILOInternational Labour OrganizationIMFInternational Monetary FundINGOinternational nongovernmental organizationIPCIntegrated Food Security and Humanitarian Phase Classification FrameworkITICInternational Tax and Investment CenterJEMJustice and Equality Movement (Sudan)LeDeRLearning Disabilities Mortality ReviewLGBTlesbian, gay, bisexual and transgenderMDGsMillennium Development GoalsMNEsmultinational enterprisesNGOnongovernmental organizationNHSNational Health Service (UK)OECDOrganization for Economic Cooperation and DevelopmentONSOffice for National Statistics (UK)OPHIOxford Poverty and Human Development InitiativeOWGOpen Working GroupPPPpurchasing power paritySDGsSustainable Development GoalsSTEPSociety of Trust and Estate PractitionersTBIJThe Bureau of Investigative JournalismTRACITTransnational Alliance to Combat Illicit TradeUNCTADThe UN Conference on Trade and DevelopmentUNDPUnited Nations Development ProgrammeUNICEFUnited Nations Children’s FundUNODCUN Office for Drugs and CrimeVATvalue-added taxWHOWorld Health Organisation
Introduction
We may pride ourselves on being the generation of open data, of big data, of transparency and accountability, but the truth is less palatable. We are the generation of the uncounted – and we barely know it.
Imagine a world of such structural inequality that even the questions of who and what gets counted are decided by power. A world in which the ‘unpeople’ at the bottom go uncounted, as does the hidden ‘unmoney’ of those at the very top. Where the unpeople are denied a political voice and access to public services, while the unmoney escapes taxation, regulation and criminal investigation, allowing corruption and inequality to flourish out of sight.
This is the world we live in. A world of inequality, uncounted.
Actual and even perceived inequalities have large and wide-ranging, negative social impacts. Higher rates of child mortality, lower life expectancies, increased likelihood of conflict, reduced trust and social cohesion, increased corruption, lower economic growth and shorter growth cycles, on and on. When we accept higher inequality, we accept these inferior outcomes. We accept the absolute and certain waste of human potential that they impose.
We accept that women will work longer and for less income. We accept that indigenous populations and marginalized ethnolinguistic groups will be systematically excluded from educational opportunities and suffer poorer health. That people with disabilities will live poorer, shorter lives. As will people from marginalized geographic regions. And as for people at the intersections of one or more of these inequalities …
Wait, though: we have broadly functional democracies, right? Surely it follows that those inequalities, those losses, are freely chosen by a majority. And if you don’t like it, couldn’t you just campaign for more people to care more about inequalities?
But debate over acceptable inequalities and acceptable redistributions is itself circumscribed by our failure to count. Political parties take positions on the basis of their ideological stance and their reading of popular concerns. Those positions mark out the space for mainstream political debate. And those positions, plus the underlying popular concerns, reflect in turn the data that is available and how it is presented.
What if common measures consistently understate the degree of income inequality, for example? Can the political debate still represent democratic preferences accurately? Or what if data is simply not collected on the inequalities facing certain groups: is the resulting absence of political debate legitimate? Or the absence of steps to reduce those groups’ exclusion? What if the failure to count means that swathes of legal, regulatory and tax responsibilities do not fall equally on certain groups? And what if the very nature of our political processes is compromised, by a failure to count all votes or all voters equally, or to ensure that political funding is appropriately regulated, so that underlying economic inequalities can map themselves onto political outcomes?
The threat that this book addresses is that decisions seen as technical go unchallenged even though they are, in fact, powerfully political, creating a systematic bias towards levels of inequality that are needlessly high and do not reflect people’s preferences. At the heart of the argument is the role played in society by statistics. I focus primarily on the analysis of data relating to the state, to which the term ‘statistics’ originally referred.
As a starting point, we can identify three core features of a state, and the related aspects of counting. First, take the state as a form of political representation. In whichever way it performs this ‘who decides’ function, it will reflect more or less well the views of citizens. This applies as much to the authoritarian state, which nonetheless requires some degree of popular support for its continuing legitimacy, as it does to the avowedly democratic state.
The state also performs a distributive role. For ease, I suggest a somewhat rough division between the second core feature, that of determining the distribution of benefits; and the third core feature, that of determining the distribution of responsibilities. There is inevitably overlap, and the split could be made elsewhere; but it is broadly useful to think of the categories as ‘what people get’ and ‘what people are required to do’.
The distribution of benefits covers everything from the most direct to the least – from, say, levels of household transfers, regional investment decisions and the provision of public services and infrastructure, to the quality and resourcing of, for example, administrative and military functions. A state can perform this role more or less well, and more or less inclusively of the whole population.
The distribution of responsibilities covers the array of legal, judicial and regulatory functions, broadly defined, from the identification and policing of criminal behaviour, the design and enforcement of regulation and – crucially – of taxation. Again, a state can perform this role more or less well, and can ensure the application of regulation is more or less inclusive of the whole population.
Each