Never have the opening lines of TS Eliot’s The Wasteland seemed more apt. In 2020, April really was the cruellest month, as the first wave of Covid-19 deaths peaked and businesses were shuttered. Between March and April, UK output slumped by a fifth.This year, April will be different. The success of the vaccine programme means the government can go...

The response was as uniform as it was predictable.When Joe Biden unveiled an audacious $1.9tn coronavirus relief package, Senator Rick Scott of Florida warned: “I think one thing the Biden administration really has to focus on is the risk of what all this debt is going to do to us.”When the president followed up with $2tn for infrastructure, Mitch ...

More than a decade has passed without any progress in bringing the global tax system into the modern age. But less than three months after taking office, President Joe Biden has raised hopes of a breakthrough, with proposals that could kill tax havens dead and force multinationals to pay a fairer share of tax.The change in tone could not be more ma...

In some government circles, the excitement before Britain’s opening-up and return to something like normality is making ministers giddy.Grant Shapps says everyone may start booking a foreign holiday now that he is at work revamping last year’s colour-coded map of the world. With a traffic-light system of testing and quarantine rules in place, it is...

Rishi Sunak has been urged to throw his full weight behind US proposals for a global minimum corporate tax rate after analysis showed it would bring in an extra £13.5bn a year for the public purse.The campaign group Tax Justice UK said the Biden administration plan would help raise billions of pounds a year for the UK exchequer by hitting multinati...

Why is a global minimum tax required?Tax systems around the world have been increasingly left behind in recent years by the rise of globalisation and digital media companies such as Google, Amazon, Apple and Facebook. They are firms operating across international borders that can shift profits around to exploit the most attractive low-tax locations...

Banks can help to turn the tide in the battle against climate breakdown by investing more in nature, the Duke of Cambridge has said.Prince William told a joint International Monetary Fund and World Bank event on the climate emergency that there needed to be a marked stepping-up of investment in projects such as reforestation and cleaner oceans.At a...

The terrible global cloud that is the Covid-19 pandemic offered the world the glimpse of a silver lining this week. New tax proposals by Joe Biden mean that the economic emergency caused by coronavirus could result in big multinational corporations having to pay the fair amounts of tax they have avoided for so long. A breakthrough this week at the ...

Britain’s construction sector has had its sharpest pick-up in activity since 2014 amid signs that the domestic economy is recovering more quickly than Brexit- and pandemic-affected trade flows, new figures have shown.The latest snapshot of the construction sector, which accounts for around 6% of total UK output, pointed to an across-the-board incre...

A wealth tax to help pay for the cost of fighting the pandemic. An international agreement to prevent a race to the bottom on corporate tax. An insistence that recovery from the second severe crisis in just over a decade should be green and inclusive. A conviction that governments should spend whatever it takes to fend off the threat of mass unempl...