Tax Havens and the Feminization of Fiscal Injustice: Unmasking the Gendered Harms of Offshore Economies in Global Trade Governance

Offshore economies - which are often conglomerate-focused industrial complexes that spend beyond their means - are central to what we propose as the “feminization of fiscal injustice”, a phenomenon was avoiding taxes disproportionately impacts women, especially from the Global South. In this article, we attempt to address the claim that international finance institutions use patriarchal decision making which dominantly excludes women’s voices to reconstruct global tax governance.[1] Feminist political economy and legal studies scholarship sheds light on how gendered and racialized the socio-economic inequalities are and how they are embedded into public revenues. Tax havens undermine gender-responsive budgeting by secretively diverting public funds.[2] Such tax evasive behavior limits access to essential public services such as healthcare and education resulting in deepening preexisting socio-economic inequalities. Another example of this ethics driven approach at reclaiming fiscal justice includes studying the abuse of taxes by multinational companies and how they eroded the space for gendered social policies in developing countries. The article seeks to analyze economically dominating paradigms that need care, equity, and inclusion and lift structural shifts above the simple metric of paying taxes. By embedding feminist caring principles into debates of tax justice[3], this approach seeks the reincarnation of international tax system and trade laws from socialist feminist perspectives while economically democratizing global trade and philanthropy.