Equity – Lone Wolf Films

MIL OSI – Source: Evening Report Arts and Media

Headline: Op-Ed: To achieve gender equality, we need women entrepreneurs

To achieve gender equality, we need women entrepreneurs

Op-Ed by Shamshad Akhtar, Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations.

In 2018, we have an opportunity to accelerate progress towards gender equality. Movements such as #MeToo have shone the spotlight on an unacceptable status quo and demonstrated how too many women the world over continue to be deprived of respect and equal opportunities. Let’s use International Women’s Day to build on this global momentum for change and suggest targeted solutions to empower women across our economies and societies. Women entrepreneurs have a key role to play.

In Asia and the Pacific, there has been some progress towards greater equality. Maternal mortality rates have dropped by over 50 per cent between 2000 and 2015. An equal number of girls and boys are now enrolled for primary school education, and near parity exists for secondary and tertiary education. But overall progress remains much too slow. On our current trajectory, South Asia would achieve gender equality in 60 years, Central Asia in 130 and East Asia and the Pacific in 160. At this rate, most women will be dead before they are equal. We need to speed things up.

With this objective in mind, the obstacles women face to find decent work or set up a business in Asia and the Pacific deserve special attention. Female labour force participation has declined in our region over the past thirty years. Most working women are trapped in precarious, informal employment, characterized by low wages and dangerous working conditions. Women are relied on to give up to six hours unpaid care work a day: invaluable to society, but thwarting career prospects, ambitions and political representation.

We know that setting up a business is a key means for women to empower themselves and break out of poverty. But just as becoming an employee is harder for women, so is becoming an entrepreneur. Barriers include a lack of access to education or training, and limited access to ICT, market information and finance. Indeed, women-owned SMEs with reliable funding sources are few and far between, in part because land is often required as collateral for credit in a region where women make up a small minority of landholders. Burdensome registration procedures combine with societal prejudice to frustrate women’s entrepreneurial potential.

The good news is that despite these constraints, the number of women entrepreneurs has been increasing in the Asia-Pacific region. Women entrepreneurs in ASEAN countries have been particularly successful. The proportion of firms with women owners stands at nearly 70 per cent in the Philippines, over 60 per cent in Thailand and over 50 per cent in Viet Nam. This has been achieved through gender responsive budgeting, programmes to support SMEs, and strong civil society advocacy to ensure women’s entrepreneurship is prioritised in national policy making. At the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) we want to build on this success and work with countries across policy areas to develop a gender responsive entrepreneurial ecosystem. Four areas are critical to do so.

First, we need to improve women’s access to diverse sources of financing. Women entrepreneurship bonds, impact investment funds and gender responsive FinTech solutions are needed to quicken the pace of change. Combined with measures to improve financial literacy, these solutions should improve access to finance but also reduce transaction costs and support broader growth.

Second, we must improve women’s access to ICT and innovative technologies. Dedicated support is needed for women SME owners wishing to adopt of the latest technology to improve business processes, product promotion and sell into bigger markets. This should be accompanied by lifelong education and training opportunities to enable women to ride successive waves of ICT innovation.

Third, we need to promote a gender responsive policy environment. Public and private institutions should increase the number of women entrepreneurs on advisory boards and the banking sector should be incentivised to serve women better. Streamlined business registration procedures and proactive outreach to potential and existing women entrepreneurs can make a real difference. Women entrepreneur networks, ensuring women’s voices are heard clearly in chambers of commerce, business associations or civil service commissions, must be part of the picture.

Making life easier for women entrepreneurs is to support women’s empowerment. It can help eliminate gender inequality, protect a fundamental human right and bring considerable economic benefits. Gender equality in Asia would increase per capita income by 70 per cent over sixty years. This would make a huge contribution to achieving sustainable development and reducing poverty. On International Women’s Day, my hope is that governments across Asia and the Pacific will be entrepreneurial about achieving equality and give women the support and opportunities they deserve.

EDITOR’S NOTE:

Shamshad Akhtar is the Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations and Executive Secretary of Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP)

MIL OSI – Source: Evening Report Arts and Media

Headline: Keith Rankin Analysis: Public Equity and Tax Benefit Reform

Keith Rankin Analysis: Public Equity and Tax Benefit Reform

Public Equity and Tax-Benefit Reform, The Policy Observatory, AUT, 13 December 2017.

Public Equity is not a difficult concept to understand. Equity is about ownership. And equity is about equality. Equal owners own what they own equally. Two equal owners of a house own that house equally. Two people with equal shares in a business have equal equity in that business. In capitalism, we understand equity to represent a private property right. That’s why many of us distrust capitalism; the problem is that emphasis on the word ‘private’.

With public equity, the same principles apply to a public property right. However, given that public property is not divisible as private property is, public equity best applies to the aggregation of public property rights; all property rights associated with a public domain. We – economic citizens – own our public domains equally.

There are multiple public domains: global, national, local, ‘iwi’ (tribal) and ‘club’. In a free world, membership of (ie belonging to) the first three is essentially a right of residence. Iwi membership is a right of birth. Club membership is a right of subscription.

While my focus here will be on the national public domain, the same principles of equality apply to all public domains. An ‘economic citizen’ of a sovereign nation is an adult with residential rights in that nation.

(In a mature global system that recognises public equity it would be desirable to have consistent global definitions of “adult” and “residential rights”. We note that, while the International Labour Organisation already has an implicit global definition of adulthood – age 15 or above [stats.oecd.org/glossary/detail.asp?ID=4848] – the New Zealand Human Rights Commission uses age 16 [hrc.co.nz/enquiries-and-complaints/what-you-can-complain-about/age/]. In a mature global order that recognises public property rights, every adult human being would be an economiccitizen of one and only one sovereign nation.)

The idea is that every economic citizen has rights – indeed equal rights – to the economic fruits of the national public domain, and that the income tax and benefit systems of a sovereign nation should reflect that right.

While developed nations each recognise these rights in different ways, the recognition is implicit rather than explicit. It is generally accepted that the much higher average incomes in developed economies reflects the higher productivity of those economies. This is not because individual labour capacities are an order of magnitude higher in economically developed countries. Rather, it is the higher levels of collective capital and investment in those economies that renders a worker more productive. Those investments (eg in education and healthcare) and capitals are substantially public in nature. Higher earnings are due to higher levels of public equity.

When we argue – as most of us do – that hourly earnings should increase with productivity, we are arguing that a return on public equity should be incorporated into our wage settlements. And we – or at least the working classes – seek immigration restrictions to create levels of labour scarcity that can enforce a relationship between productivity and wages.

In economically developed countries, most of us also subscribe to a comprehensive economic ‘safety net’ that ensures that every economic citizen gets something – indeed enough to ensure basic provision for dependent children. This is another acknowledgement of public equity, that a public equity dividend should not exclude any economic citizen, even though economic citizens in different life-situations receive their returns on public equity through different payment mechanisms.

Access to land, and to the fruits of land – including clean air and clean water – is also a beneficial return on public equity. That’s why our ancestors came to Aotearoa, as economic migrants.

So we – in New Zealand and in other economically developed countries – do pay public equity dividends (lower case). We do not pay Public Equity Dividends (upper case), meaning formal or explicit payments that serve as a baseline yield on public equity. Our public equity dividends – haphazard, covert, unacknowledged – are nevertheless real. That’s why many people from economically less developed countries would like to live in New Zealand; New Zealand is richer in public capital, and pays higher public equity dividends than their economies of origin. Public equity dividends – mostly subsumed into wages – form the motivation for economic migration between countries. And the motivation for resistance to economic immigrants on the part of existing residents.

In my Report on Public Equity published this week – Public Equity and Tax-Benefit Reform – I have endeavoured to find some commonality across the various kinds of cash benefits that New Zealand economic citizens receive, with a particular emphasis on conceptually integrating those benefits paid unconditionally through the income tax system with those benefits paid (conditionally, except for New Zealand Superannuation) through agencies such as ‘Work and Income’. Benefits here represent ‘publicly-sourced disposable income’; income paid either as explicit benefits, as tax concessions, or as a mix of both.

I have called the most important benefit paid through the income tax mechanism – paid unconditionally though implicitly – as a ‘public equity benefit’ (PEB); a benefit that represents the value of the tax concessions that arise from lower marginal taxes on income brackets below $70,000 per year. Then, by adding that benefit (upto $175 per week) to the explicit benefits many New Zealanders receive, I have shown that most economic citizens receive total benefit amounts of $175 per week (or more). Further, for most of the rest, their total benefit is already close to $175 per week.

As a result of this conflation of the two different sorts of benefits that we receive, it is clear that our public equity could fund an explicit Public Equity Dividend (PED) of at least $175 per week, payable formally to all economic citizens. In addition, we have the means to fund both a universal superannuation (the difference between present New Zealand Superannuation and the PED) and to continue paying conditional benefits as social assistance to those for whom $175 per week is insufficient.

Today, and from a 33% tax rate, we can easily pay ourselves a formal Public Equity Dividend of $175 per week. It represents both a holistic accounting perspective on our present benefit payments, and a commitment to removing the welfare ‘cracks’ that too many New Zealanders are falling into. Economic citizens are entitled to an explicit and universal publicly-sourced equity dividend. It’s their public property right.

Can public property rights address the twin issues of inequality and poverty? Yes. But, in the first instance, such reformed public accounting gives an intellectual mandate to stem the haemorrhage of purchasing power from the poor to the rich. Then, it gives us the intellectual tools to determine whether 33% is the most efficient income tax rate for a country such as New Zealand, and whether $175 per week is the most appropriate level of unconditional publicly-sourced benefit. (Possibly both numbers are too low.) And it gives us to tools to determine a mechanism to raise productivity over time – and to raise our just returns to public equity, the principal determinant of productivity growth.