“A real good idea to improve the fairness of our tax system”, according to economist and Nobel Prize winner Esther Duflo

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The superprofits tax is “a really good idea” provided “don’t stop there”, estimates Esther Duflo, Nobel Prize in Economics 2019, invited Friday, September 2 on France Inter. According to her, “we must seize every opportunity to improve the fairness of our tax system, even if it is only part of the solution”.

She sees it as a way to open the debate “on the fact that corporate profits are not taxed fairly today”, in France, but also abroad, and in particular in the United States. But Esther Duflo calls for the wrong diagnosis, considering that taxation of superprofits and the banning of private jets are only “the tip of the iceberg”. In other words, it will not be enough to fight in depth against global poverty and climate change.

She recalls that the health situation coupled with the effects of climate change and the war in Ukraine “rush”, “accelerate” poverty. “We are at the confluence of a series of factors which produce a 13% increase in food prices over the year, on a global scale”, she explains. The consequences on people’s lives are “immediate”adds the economist.

“We went from 130 million to 345 million people in extreme nutritional fragility, the stage just before famine.”

Esther Duflo, Nobel Prize in Economics

at franceinfo

Esther Duflo points the finger at the “huge responsibility” rich countries in climate change and “within the rich countries”, the behavior of “those who are the richest”. “The richer we are, the more we consume, the more we consume, the more emissions it produces. The emissions produced in China are produced to allow our own consumption”, she details. According to the economist, “Progress on climate change can only be achieved through strong political action and a better distribution of income”.

The Nobel Prize in Economics pleads for “a drastic sobriety”considering that “individual behavior”the fact of “sort your trash cans and turn off the lights”are at the same time “indispensable and completely insufficient”. She hopes that the climatic situation “dramatic” of France, this summer, will have had at least “the positive effect” from U.S “raise awareness that climate change is not just in the future, it’s not just the others. If it was 35-40 degrees in France, it was 50 degrees in India in May,” insists Esther Duflo.

“We have to ask ourselves more fundamentally the question of the distribution of the benefits, of the resources that exist and that can only go through an overhaul of the taxation system at all levels”, summarizes the economist. Esther Duflo thus appeals to “the adequate distribution of wealth and income vis-à-vis the rest of the world”.


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