Event
Start Date: 19th May 2026 - 3:05 PM
End Date: 19th May 2026 - 3:55 PM
Time zone: BST
Location: London, UK
The UK is cohosting on 19-20 May the Global Partnerships Conference, a major summit on the future of international development to drive shared growth and prosperity and tackle global challenges head on.
Organised on the sidelines of the Conference, our side event will provide practical lessons drawn from research on tax reform in lower-income countries. It will focus on how reforms can be effective at scaling tax revenues, as well as being equitable and sustainable.
Boosting fiscal resilience in lower-income countries has acquired a renewed urgency in the new reality of development finance. While aid decreases substantially, many lower-income countries also face pressing debt servicing costs that exceed what they can spend on basic services for their citizens.
Navigating the next era of development requires a new paradigm grounded in resilience, self-reliance, and partnership. Taxation is key to getting this right. While low and middle-income countries collect at least $1.5 trillion in tax revenue, this is still nowhere near the $4 trillion required to plug the financing gap toward the SDGs. It is impossible to conceive of a more self-determined development model in which tax does not play a larger role. When they are ineffective or inequitable, however, efforts to raise more revenue can undermine tax collection and public trust.
The challenge is massive, but we have a clear roadmap: more than a decade of context-specific evidence, much of which has been generated through partnerships between revenue authorities, civil society associations, finance ministers and researchers in the UK and across the globe. These partnerships enable officials and researchers to leverage data, share skills, jointly identify key insights, and embed learning feedback loops in real-time.
Scott Caldwell, Head of Public Finance and Tax Department, FCDO, UK Government
