Fiscal justice ensures a fair and equitable distribution of tax burdens and public resources, promoting social equity, reducing inequalities, and ensuring everyone contributes and benefits according to their means.
Fiscal Justice
What is Fiscal Justice?
Why Fiscal Justice Is Important for Workers in Informal Employment?
Fiscal justice for workers in the informal economy involves creating a tax system that recognizes their contributions, and does not load unfair levels of taxation on poorer workers. It means providing access to fairly-financed social and labour protections, and ensuring they benefit from adequately provisioned public and workplace services. It aims to reduce economic disparities, allowing workers in informal employment to experience greater income stability and security.
Workers in informal employment face significant challenges in relation to public finance systems. Contrary to a common narrative that paints them as “tax evaders”, these workers are often incorporated into taxation systems on adverse and regressive terms, leading to persistent economic insecurity. At the same time, they experience exclusion from public protections which are necessary to ensure income stability. This exclusion is often linked to insufficient attention being paid in national and local budgets to the extension of protections to workers in the informal economy.
Resources Related to Fiscal Justice
Discover Our Themes
The following themes represent areas of strategic focus for WIEGO.