Mycobacterium ulcerans is the causative agent of the chronic skin infection Buruli ulcer. In contrast to most mycobacteria, M. ulcerans is predominantly found in the extracellular milieu in patient lesions. This is attributed to the production of a polyketide lactone, mycolactone, which inhibits innate immune responses and is cytotoxic to macrophages. Nevertheless, early in infection, intracellular bacteria are readily detectable and genetic evidence suggests that macrophages may play a role in controlling disease progression. In particular, polymorphisms in components of the autophagy pathway are reported to influence the severity of Buruli ulcer. However, little is known about the interaction between M. ulcerans and macrophages. We are currently investigating the cellular response to M. ulcerans by the autophagy pathway in macrophages. Early findings indicate that autophagy markers are upregulated in infected THP-1 macrophage-like cells, but these rarely colocalise with the bacteria.
The assessment of dietary advice delivered by a personalised mobile application to improve glucose control for adults with type 2 diabetes
Introduction
Finding an optimal diet that suits millions of people has proven to be challenging for nutrition research. Advances in technology, specifically AI, have enabled us to gather and process vast amounts of information as a tool to create a higher level of personalization and subsequently to boost diet adherence. While the number of nutrition apps is infinite, few provide adaptive evidence-based nutrition advice for patients with type 2 diabetes (T2D) residing in Germany. Therefore, as part of the PROTEIN project we aim to trial a dynamic personalized nutrition application to improve dietary compliance in T2D.
Objectives
We aim to customize meal plans according to data from the PROTEIN health expert team, the subjects’ preferences and their continuous glucose monitor (CGM) data. Our primary objective is to increase the time in range (TIR) of the study participants by 5%.
Methods
PROTEIN, a RCT, has a 3-month intervention period. Here, the subjects will use our application, a CGM and an activity tracker to collect essential data to provide personalization. The AI advisor is responsible for providing the meal plans and consists of a food and activity recommender system (FARS) and a reasoning-based decision support system (RDSS). The researchers on site will upload recent CGM data (7-14 days) that will be used to provide customized plans according to postprandial glucose excursions during the intervention period. If the TIR is below 70%, the goal „Decrease carbohydrates“ will be activated for next week’s recommendations. Foods, apart from vegetables and pulses, that caused high glucose levels (≥140 mg/dL over 2-4 hours) will activate a push notification directly to the user. If a food causes high glucose levels on two or more separate occasions, it will be excluded from the meal plans the following week.
Results
The app is being tested in virtual users to assure the appropriateness of the meal plans created by the AI advisor for each user. 300 subjects are planned to be tested.
Conclusions
The PROTEIN system creates adequate meal plans for virtual users with high glucose levels suggesting that an improvement of TIR can be achieved in real patients.
Funding
European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 817732
The DarT/G toxin-antitoxin system encodes a pair of enzymes that mediate the addition of an ADP-ribose moiety onto thymidine in ssDNA in a reversible, sequence specific manner. Although originally characterised in Thermus aquaticus, the system is present in a number of important pathogens including all members of the mammal adapted M. tuberculosis complex, notably including human and bovine TB. Utilizing CRISPRi technology to silence DarG antitoxin expression, we have shown that DarT performs ADP-ribosylation of gDNA in cellulo in M. bovis BCG, leading to a rapid arrest of DNA replication and cell division, and that is ultimately toxic to the bacterium. In MTBC, darT and darG are transcriptionally linked to the dnaB gene, which encodes the replicative helicase that interacts with ssDNA at the chromosome origin (OriC) to initiate then drive DNA branch migration during replication. We demonstrate in vitro and in cellulo that MTBC DarT heavily ADP-ribosylates TTTW motifs in the AT-rich DnaB-loading region of OriC, suggesting that the DarTG system may work as a reversible regulator of replication. Furthermore, unregulated ADP-riboslyation by DarT induces the DNA damage SOS response, including the ImuA’ImuB/DnaE2 mutasome which has been implicated in DNA damage-induced mutagenesis and acquisition of resistance to antibiotics.
Immunopurification and NGS sequencing of ADP-riboslyated gDNA fragments has given further insight into the role of ADP-riboslyation in M. tuberculosis physiology, confirming ADP-ribosylation of OriC and demonstrating ADP-ribosylation at additional genomic loci, prominently including genes involved in the SOS response, DNA metabolism, and ribosomal proteins. This identifies the potential for ADP-ribosylation to act as a genome-wide epigenetic and cell signalling factor.
We aim to further understand the role of DarTG in bacterial physiology including DNA replication, the DNA damage response, persistence and drug-resistance in Mycobacterium tuberculosis.
Over the millennium, M. tuberculosis complex strains have branched into several lineages and genotypic variations can determine the virulence and transmissibility of clinical M. tuberculosis (Mtb). However, the mechanism behind the variability in transmission of Mtb remains elusive. Therefore, we investigated understanding the pathogenesis and vaccine efficacy between the high, moderate and low transmission Mtb in mice. The study used three Mtb strains based on their transmission within the Kenyan population – high, moderate and low. The project focused on the characterisation of Mtb strains isolated from Kenyan individuals, BCG vaccine efficacy and pathological analysis in mice against Mtb strains.
The causative agent of tuberculosis (TB), Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb), is an intracellular pathogen infecting nearly 10 million people world-wide. Its cousin, Mycobacterium abscessus (MABC), is a major cause of death in immunocompromised individuals. However, despite the availability of multi-drug chemotherapy, the majority of deaths in both are due to drug-sensitive strains. This is often due to the presence of a phenotypically-resistant sub-population of bacteria termed antibiotic persisters in TB, which increase upon intracellular exposure, or antibiotic-tolerant biofilms within the lung airways for MABC. Determining antibiotic penetration and targeting persisters and biofilms can be challenging in highly heterogenous mycobacteria. We aim to use single cell techniques, such as microfluidics, nano-scale secondary ion mass spectrometry and atomic force microscopy, to evaluate antibiotic penetration and survival and to identify novel strategies to curtail these global health threats.
No abstract but I have a poster focused on the BEAT diabetes programme – a consortium between industry, the NHS and the university of surrey to roll-out and evaluate a digital, online, supported self-management programme for people living with type 2 diabetes. We have recruited >600 people to take part in the programme and matched with a control group to evaluate the impact of the programme on glycosylated haemoglobin (HbA1c) and our secondary outcomes, including weight, blood pressure and cholesterol. We have also conducted a qualitative process evaluation to sit alongside this implementation study.
The ability of genetically identical cells to display different phenotypes is a significant obstacle for the treatment of many human diseases. This is especially true for tuberculosis (TB), a bacterial infection caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Heterogeneity plays a key role in TB’s continued presence as a global health threat, providing a huge reservoir of latent disease in the world and preventing cure of active disease. Genetic diversity of either host or pathogen does not, alone, explain all this heterogeneity. We hypothesize that non-genetic sources of heterogeneity in pathogen populations lead to variation in outcome. Testing this hypothesis with conventional methods is difficult as it requires studying pathogen cells as individuals, rather than populations, at timescales that can capture the dynamics of heterogeneity. In addition, developing therapeutics to target heterogeneity demands a deep understanding of the molecular mechanisms underlying this phenomenon. My lab uses a combination of fluorescent reporters, time-lapse microscopy, and bacterial genetics to understand the mechanisms and consequences of phenotypic heterogeneity in mycobacterial populations.
This presentation explores how the University of Surrey’s first ever artist-in-residence Anna Dumitriu engages with cutting edge research methods in the health sciences to engage and inspire diverse audiences in new technologies that have the potential to affect all our lives.
Dumitriu works hands-on in the lab and the art studio to create sculptural or installation-based works that incorporate diverse materials such as altered historical objects, textiles, bacteria and DNA. Her high impact artworks draw threads across time, from the history of science and medicine to cutting edge fields such as synthetic biology and bacterial genomics and have been shown around the world in prestigious museums and galleries and featured across all forms of media and in numerous publications.
Since 2012 she has been developing artworks that explore tuberculosis, such as her ‘Romantic Disease’ and ‘Susceptible’ projects which have taken audiences on a journey from past superstitions about the disease to the application of cutting edge genomics techniques to combat issues of antibiotic resistance. In the past year she has been working with researchers at the University of Surrey to explore new research and techniques from looking for ancient bovine TB DNA in Iron Age bones, and the development of vaccines, to carbon capturing microbes, and quantum biology.
Her multi-layered artworks enable audiences to explore scientific ideas, as well as the ethical, cultural and societal impacts of new technologies through sensory and aesthetic approaches, inviting viewers to notice important things that have previously gone unnoticed and to think about them in different ways. She peels away layers of complexity and providing glimpses of ‘weak signals’ from the future, and always reflecting on the past.
We are developing open multidimensional fluorescence microscopy instrumentation, including endomicroscopy, high content analysis (HCA), super-resolved microscopy, and optical projection tomography (OPT). We have particularly focused on fluorescence lifetime imaging (FLIM) and Forster resonant energy transfer (FRET) to study molecular interactions and more recently on super-resolved microscopy using single molecule localisation microscopy (SMLM) to probe ultrastructure and molecular clustering. To provide a complementary label-free readout, we are developing semi-quantitative (single-shot) phase contrast imaging for cell segmentation, tracking and morphology quantification.
For our current and future fluorescence microscopy, we are developing a modular open-source microscopy platform based on openFrame, a low-cost, modular, open microscopy hardware platform to be used with open-source software tools, including MicroManager and FIJI, for instrument control, data acquisition, analysis and management, in order to make them practical in lower resource settings. We are particularly focussing on implementing our techniques in an open-source HCA platform for more robust cell biology studies.
For FLIM/FRET HCA, we have developed an automated multiwell plate FLIM platform utilising open-source software for data acquisition and analysis, which we have applied to assay protein interactions, including applications to viral disease processes. For super-resolved HCA, we are developing automated multiwell plate easySTORM, providing low-cost, large FOV SMLM together with accelerated open-source SMLM analysis parallelised on a high-performance computing cluster. We have applied easySTORM in studies of defective phagocytosis, cancer and kidney disease.
For clinical applications we are developing histoSTORM – an implementation of easySTORM with frozen or FFPE tissue sections and clinically-approved antibody labelling. Other open microscopy developments include a low-cost modular OPT platform that can image mm-cm scale samples, including live zebrafish, and can provide single-shot volumetric imaging.
Enteroinvasive pathogens, such as Shigella and Salmonella, induce their uptake into non-phagocytic epithelial cells through the injection of effectors by the type-3-secretion system. The bacteria are ingested in tight bacterial-containing vacuoles (BCVs) that are surrounded by in situ formed infection-associated macropinosomes (IAMs). In contrast to previous reports, we have recently shown via novel 3D imaging techniques that macropinocytosis is not required for the entry of these bacterial pathogens, however the IAMs regulate their subsequent intracellular trafficking. In the case of Shigella, IAMs do not fuse with the BCV, and contact between these two compartments results in the destabilization of the BCV and membrane rupture. In the case of Salmonella two scenarios occur; IAMs either fuse with the BCV, which results in the generation of the Salmonella containing vacuole surrounded by Salmonella induced filaments (Sifs). Simple contact between IAMs and the BCV also promote vacuolar rupture in the case of Salmonella leading to cytoplasmic hyper-replication. Interestingly, BCV contacts with the surrounding compartments also dictates intravuolar bacterial growth or dormancy. We have performed ultra-structural studies, combined with dynamic imaging and proteomics of the involved compartments to identify the molecules that drive these complex interactions. This has shown a regulatoy network of Rab GTPases, the Exocyst complex, and SNAREs that is hijacked by injected bacterial effectors. I will describe how these factors determine the intracellular niche formation for both, Shigella and Salmonella.
Measuring metabolic fluxes in living cells by 13C metabolic flux analysis has become a key technology for improving our quantitative understanding of cellular metabolism. After two and a half decades of development, driven by diverse analytical and computational innovations, a rich set of tools has become available supporting all steps of the 13C MFA workflow, ranging from the assembly of high-fidelity models and their efficient simulation to convenient design of informative tracer compositions. For studying complex biological systems in less defined environments, such as pathogens residing in a host, however, many challenges remain. One critical step is the identification of a “useful” model formulation with which the fluxes are to be inferred from the data at hand. In the talk, I will present new directions in 13C MFA, powered by Bayesian statistics, to go about this hitherto neglected question and show first successful applications for Escherichia coli and Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Following this path keeps promise to strengthen the position of 13C MFA as an epistemic tool for explaining phenotypes and building models of metabolism.
The presence of metals within biological systems has long been associated with physiological and metabolic processes of the body, including synthesis of complex biomolecules, energy production and intracellular signaling. The determination of elemental distributions in cells is therefore critical in advancing our understanding of disease pathogenesis. Of particular interest is the study of cellular responses to external stimuli, specifically for the development of novel drug treatments which minimize or eliminate undesirable side effects. For this purpose, it is necessary to assess how the metabolic state and variations in elemental distributions of a cellular population impact the effectiveness of drugs and susceptibility to infection. In order to carry out this type of research, sensitive instrumentation and accurate analysis methods are required, however current techniques often exhibit severe matrix effects, poor spatial resolution and high cost. Recent advances have focused on the use of Laser Ablation – Inductively Coupled Plasma – Mass Spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS) and Laser Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (LIBS), with both techniques adapting the physical process of laser ablation in which a short pulsed laser beam is focused on the sample. The emission of light of a specific wavelength by the elements upon excitation by the laser and the removal of fine ablated particles from the surface of the sample are used for qualitative and quantitative analysis.
This project, funded by the Doctoral College at the University of Surrey and the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC/T009187/1), aims to open the door to new possibilities for cellular research by developing novel methods for biochemical elemental analysis. Investigation of the optimum sample preparation and substrate for the analysis of cells using LIBS has been explored, with issues surrounding sensitivity for intrinsic elemental analysis having been identified. Future work will focus on tackling the analysis of exogenous metals associated with Tuberculosis drugs incorporated into THP-1 cells.
Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is one of the major challenges we are facing this century. Understanding the mechanism behind the rise of AMR is therefore crucial to tackle this global threat. This is the case for Mycobacterium abscessus (Mabs), a fast-growing non-tuberculous mycobacterium considered as a “clinical nightmare” due to difficulties in its treatment and its multiple resistance and tolerance mechanisms to antibiotics. Mabs is an environmental bacterium whose physiology is driven by environmental factors. Among those are transition metals such as copper, cobalt and nickel. How presence of these ions affects Mabs physiology and its drug susceptibility is unknown, and any research addressing this question will considerably increase our knowledge in AMR and help discovery of a potential drug target. During my PhD, I investigated the impact of transition metals on Mabs physiology and how it affects drug susceptibility, using microbiological and bioenergetic techniques in combination with targeted and untargeted metabolomics with liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS). Use of LC-MS flux analysis with stable isotope labelling identified how nickel (Ni2+), a transition metal ion widely present in the water system, perturb Mabs central carbon metabolism and nitrogen metabolism. These results agree with RNA sequencing and bioenergetics studies using Seahorse analyser showing decreased activity of TCA cycle activity and changes in expression of the related enzymes. Mass spectrometry also enabled quantification of intracellular uptake of antibiotics by Mabs in presence of Ni2+ and efflux pump inhibitors, showing that increased uptake of antibiotics, such as clarithromycin upon Ni2+ treatment, could be linked to increased susceptibility of Mabs. In conclusion, this study demonstrates that transition metals in environment interfere with carbon and nitrogen metabolism, which in turn shapes its drug susceptibility. Targeting Mabs metabolic enzymes or the way Mabs senses and responds to trace elements could offer new solutions to tackle AMR.
It is an area of study I am working in and developing
Bridgette Wessels is Professor and Director of Digital Society and Economy Interdisciplinary Research Theme at the University of Glasgow. She has undertaken research in the social and cultural shaping and use of digital technologies, and she is currently undertaking research in the domestication of automation in homes in rural Scotland.
Under an EPSRC fellowship programme, our team are exploring the integration of elemental mapping, provided by an ion beam accelerator with “omics”. We are developing new workflows for multimodal elemental and mass spectrometry imaging, and are applying these tools to various biological systems. Here we will show how these new tools may give new insight into the pathogenesis of tuberculosis.
We hare also developing a nanocapillary sampling tool for the analysis of lipids and drugs in single, living cells. We will show how this approach has been used to explore the relationship between anti-TB drug uptake and lipid profiles in single cells.
Understanding the distribution of a dosed drug within the body is a key part of the drug development process, both in terms of drug efficacy (does the drug reach the target area and at sufficient concentration to have a pharmacological effect?) and potential side effects (where else does the drug go and what does it do there?). As many current drug targets are intracellular the ability to visualise unlabelled compounds inside the cell at physiological dosages can offer valuable insight into the compound behaviour both on and off-target. Understanding the effect a compound has on the underlying biology and the reasons why cellular responses vary is vital to successful drug discovery.
This talk will discuss our work using mass spectrometry to image the distribution of dosed molecules in cells and their effect on endogenous molecules. Examples will include the use of use Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometry (SIMS) to image the 3-dimensional spatial distribution of unlabelled drugs and identify endogenous metabolites at cellular resolutions. Our use of the LiveCell MS technology, originally developed by Professor Masujima, using a semi-automated methodology that allows the collection of intracellular content with a modified CQ1 imaging system developed by Yokowaga will also be discussed. In this work, we show the applicability of the LiveCell MS technology to drug discovery and its ability to identify drug related material and endogenous metabolites when incubated in a mammalian cell at a therapeutic dose. We will also discuss the dynamic range of single cell analysis by direct comparison with data from a metabolomics assay using bulk samples.
Test
The last two decades have been a period of great ferment in international taxation. Economic globalisation and the digitalisation of the economy have resulted in substantial changes in business models and structures. These have in turn led to concerns about whether the existing international tax system, designed for a world of physical, largely bilateral trade and investment, is fit for purpose in a world of global supply chains and virtual goods and services. These concerns started to come to a head with the financial crisis of 2008. At the same time, the rise of emerging and developing countries in the tax arena has called into question the consensus that developed in the early to mid-20th century.
This has led to two major developments in the international tax system. The first was the implementation of the Foreign Account Tax Compliance regime (FATCA) and the Common Reporting Standard (CRS). The second is the Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS) project initiated by the G20 in 2012 and led by the OECD. The BEPS project has suffered from two major failings. The proposed solutions are innovative procedurally and have increased tax multilateralism via the Inclusive Framework and the Multilateral Instrument. Substantively and conceptually, however, they largely revisit proposals and discussions that have been around for decades. The G20 and the OECD were largely driven by revenue concerns and the need to be seen to be doing something, and quickly. Both are unconducive to fundamental review and reform. Furthermore, the OECD countries were not and are not interested in challenging an international tax regime that largely benefits them, to the detriment of many developing countries.
This concentration on revenue and performative politics and the unwillingness to address fundamental questions have meant that the policy and academic discourse has been almost exclusively on corporate taxation. With the important exception of account information reporting (FATCA and CRS), the treatment of individuals has been left out of the discussion.
This is unfortunate, because the international tax system is as out of date for individuals, in particular for expatriate and migrant individuals, as it is for corporations. The existing system was designed for a world of physical provision of services, limited cross-border investment by individuals and limited voluntary migration. All of this has changed with advances in communications and transportation. Estimates by the World Bank, the United Nations and others vary, but currently there are about 275 million expatriates and migrants. Although not more than 3.5% of the world’s population, this number has risen sharply in the last few decades. In addition, this ‘new mobility’ is often marked by multiple or serial migrations. Expatriates and migrants can be caught by overlapping jurisdiction, multiple reporting requirements and dual tax residency.
At the same time, FATCA and CRS raise issues of data privacy and security, while proposals for net wealth taxes, if implemented in any serious way, will need to deal with the same issues of double taxation and privacy that arise in the income taxation of individuals.
These regimes for the taxation of individuals need to be considered in terms of both fairness to individuals and fairness as between states, particularly where the competition is between developed and developing ones. The literature on fairness in taxation at the domestic level is inappropriate for evaluating international tax policy, and the developing literature on the appropriate the cross-border taxation of entities does not sufficiently address the rights of states or of natural persons in the taxation of individuals, which raises fundamental issues of human rights, justice and privacy that do not apply to entities. The paper will examine the normative basis of the existing regimes for taxing individuals in the cross-border context and consider the implications of notions of fairness for our understanding of the international taxation of individuals.
The Economic Allegiance of Capital Gains
How to ensure that multinational companies are paying their “fair share” of taxes in the countries in which they create value has been the subject of lively debate within the international tax community in recent years. These debates have led to significant and exciting reforms, namely the OECD/G20 Inclusive Framework. While these reforms represent an important step towards creating a more coherent and equitable international tax system, the current conversations have overlooked an essential fact. Value created by a company’s business activities manifests itself in two ways—as business income and as an increase in the overall market value of the company, which then translates into capital gains income when investors sell their shares. Thus far, the conversation has focused exclusively on how to divide taxing authority over company income, missing half the story. A truly comprehensive reform that ensures fairness and equity in international taxation must address the question of how taxing authority over income stemming from the growth in company value should be allocated amongst countries.
This paper fills this gap and assesses how taxing authority over this capital gains income should be divided amongst countries under the normative principles that have guided international tax law for the past 100 years. It concludes that the current international sourcing rules, which allocated taxing authority over capital gains income from the sale of company shares to the investor’s residence country, are at odds with the benefits principle and the related concept of economic allegiance. Not allowing the countries in which companies conduct business (the “source countries”) to tax capital gains income produces an inequitable result whereby a country and its citizens provide benefits and resources that facilitate a company’s business activities without being able to tax income derived from the value created by those business activities.
Digitalization and informational capitalism have revolutionized the global economy in ways that the original designers of the international tax system could never have foreseen when they established international sourcing rules in the 1920s compromise. While granting taxing authority over capital gains income exclusively to the residence country has always been inappropriate and inequitable, this paper argues that certain features of the digital economy have magnified the incoherence and inequities that the current international sourcing rules cause. The first feature is the phenomenon of company growth without income. The drafters of the 1920s compromise worked under the assumption that growth in the value of a company would be accompanied by business income. As a result, even though the source country could not tax capital gains income, it would receive some tax revenue by taxing the company’s business income, thereby providing compensation for the benefits provided. In the digital economy, this is not always the case. Because establishing a robust network of users and customers is essential for many digital business models, particularly platform businesses, digital companies often achieve enormous market capitalizations before ever turning a profit. Digital companies are, therefore, able to create large amounts of value through business activities in a country without ever being taxed there. This broad phenomenon was inconceivable to economists and policymakers in the 1920s.
Additionally, the paper argues that several of the essential drivers of company value in the digital economy have a particularly close economic allegiance to the source country, furthering the unfairness of the source country being unable to tax capital gains income stemming from that growth in company value. These drivers of company value are network effects, data collection, and the free labor of users and customers who create content and data for these companies. The paper analyzes these drivers of value under the same criteria that the 1923 Four Economists’ report used to assess the economic allegiance of agricultural, mining, and industrial activities and finds a strong economic allegiance to the source country. Furthermore, when digital companies are building networks, collecting data, and taking advantage of the free labor of users and customers, they are not only relying on benefits and resources provided by governments to facilitate their business activities and grow their market value. They are also relying on benefits and resources provided by the citizens of the country themselves, in a dynamic that many scholars have highlighted as exploitative and harmful. This reliance makes the violation of the benefits principle caused by not allowing source countries to tax capital gains more acute. Granting taxing authority to the source country is not only needed to directly compensate the government for benefits provided but is also needed to indirectly compensate citizens for the benefits and resources they provide. Allowing the source country to tax capital gains income both realigns taxation of capital gains with the normative goals of the benefits principle and economic allegiance and alleviates some of the exploitative and inegalitarian outcomes we see in the digital economy.
This paper is primarily a proof of concept. But it also presents a policy suggestion to implement this reallocation of taxing authority to source countries—an annual mark-to-market tax at the company level on increases in market value, apportioned amongst source countries based on a set formula. The goal of this policy discussion is to begin a broader conversation about possible global reforms to create an international tax system that is more in line with its underlying normative goals.
Why “Global” Fails:
Inclusive Institutions & International Tax Policy Making
In recent years we got to witness an increasing “globalisation” of tax policy, with leading policy institutions arguing that intensified internationalisation of tax policy issues is key to prosperity and stability of the global community. At the same time, we see more and more lower-income jurisdictions refusing to cooperate or adapt “global” tax policies, and implementing unilateral solutions instead. Many of them have claimed that international tax policy fora fail to properly include them in decision-making processes and represent their financial interests.
Globalization and digitalization of the past decades led to increased interconnectedness of sovereign nations, however, jurisdictions are still very different in terms of size and structure of their economies among other factors. Therefore, their tax policy choices also differ significantly. Recent research showed that the existing global tax policy institutions are systematically biased towards protecting financial interests of large, industrialized, capital-exporting countries, while they fail to properly represent “developing” countries interests. However, the demand for fair international tax policies, as well as for recognition of historical injustices related to international taxation, is clearly present, and truly inclusive institutions are key to achieving these goals.
The institutional architecture of global tax policy making has become very complex, with many national, regional and international actors pursuing various goals. While several platforms have an ambition to lead the international tax debate, the leading position of the OECD remains strong, and a shift of tax policy making to another platform in the nearest future seems unlikely from political perspective. Recently, the OECD experienced an important – yet very rapid – organizational change when the Inclusive Framework was created. The organisational structure, processes and practices will need time to adjust and to deliver desirable outcomes, while at the moment lower-income jurisdictions are still experiencing multiple issues when voicing their opinions and trying to affect content of tax policies drafted by the OECD.
The paper explores the influence that limited access of “developing” states and territories to international tax policy making had on the system of international taxation and inequalities between the Global North and the Global South. In addition, it discusses how institutional architecture of tax policy making can be altered to address the issue and distribute taxing rights in accordance with value creation rather than economic power. Argumentation is based on analysis of relevant OECD organisational documentation, publicly available macroeconomic data, in-depth interviews with tax policy professionals and experience of other institutions.
However, the OECD is not the first international forum experiencing inclusivity issues but aiming at representing its participants on an equal footing. Many international organizations faced similar challenges, and while it is difficult to judge how “perfect” their models of inclusion are, their experience is not to be wasted. I also explore experience of other international organizations by investigating what did they do to improve representation and inclusion of lower-income jurisdictions, and what lessons can be learnt from their experience. In particular, I attempt answering the following three research questions:
Q 1: What did other international organizations do to improve their inclusivity / representation of “developing” countries?
Q 2: Are there some parts of their experience that can be borrowed by the OECD to better represent interests of lower-income jurisdictions and produce more balanced policies?
Q 3: What amendments / additions to these practices might be needed given the international tax context?
This part of analysis examines experience of international institutions such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision as well as the Financial Action Task Force.