A thousand economists, including Millennium Development Goals advocate Jeffrey Sachs, have joined the call to tax financial market transactions to raise money for programs in the developing world.
“The financial crisis has shown us the dangers of unregulated finance, and the link between the financial sector and society has been broken. It is time to fix this link and for the financial sector to give something back to society,” the economists wrote in a letter to G-20 finance ministers and philanthropist Bill Gates, whom current G-20 chairman French President Nicolas Sarkozy commissioned to help identify innovative ways of financing global development efforts.
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Sarkozy has previously aired support for implementing the financial transaction tax.
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The economists argued that implementing the financial transaction tax, even at very low rates of 0.05 percent or less, could mobilize hundreds of billions of dollars annually.
“This money is urgently needed to raise revenue for global and domestic public goods such as health, education and water, and to tackle the challenge of climate change,” they said in the letter, which was obtained and published by the Guardian.
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