T20

The longer-term impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on skills, jobs and welfare raises key challenges that are common to the G20 economies and require a coordinated response. With lower paid, more insecure and younger workers more likely to have been working in shutdown sectors, labour market inequalities are likely to increase. Young people, particularly from poorer backgrounds, have also seen significant disruption to their learning, and the job prospects of those entering the labour force are limited.

This policy brief sheds light on the implications of EU trade policies – with a special focus on food safety standards – for women’s access to the labour market in developing countries. The thrust of this policy brief is to highlight the entrenched inequality of opportunities and gender bias in developing countries that the G20 have development cooperation with, and how such inequalities interact with their trade policies.

We recommend the institution of a Global Citizen Income as a stepping stone toward fostering social, civil and political citizenship at the global level. We outline a gradual implementation roadmap and propose increased international aid, a mix of progressive global taxes and a carbon tax, to fund it. A Global Citizen Income would provide an automatic safety net against systemic shocks like COVID-19 and empower individuals starting, from the most ulnerable.

Addressing the learning loss caused by the difficulty of education provision during the COVID-19 pandemic will be a key challenge faced by the world for the coming decades.

We propose to institute a new annual tax of 0.2% on corporations’ stock shares for all publicly listed companies headquartered in G20 countries. As the G20 stock market capitalization is around US$ 90 trillion, the tax would raise approximately US$ 180 billion each year. Because stock ownership is highly concentrated among the rich, this global tax would be progressive. The tax could be paid in-kind by corporations (by issuing new stock) so that the tax does not raise liquidity issues for new and innovative firms, nor does it affect business operations.