For much of the past two decades, debates on international tax reform have been framed largely as a divide between the Global North and the Global South. While these structural inequalities remain deeply important, a broader challenge is increasingly emerging across countries of all income levels: ensuring that wealth, capital and multinational corporations contribute fairly to the societies from which they derive value.
Across the world, governments face mounting fiscal pressures, widening inequality, declining public trust, and growing demands forquality public services. At the same time, unprecedented concentrations of wealth, increasingly mobile capital, and rapidly changing global business models are testing the capacity of tax systems to deliver fairness and legitimacy.
This opening plenary will examine these shared challenges through a global lens, exploring how the pursuit of tax justice has become part of a broader struggle for democratic accountability, economic fairness and sustainable development. It will set the political and moral foundation for the conference by highlighting the common interests that increasingly unite cou