According to a Statement made by OECD Secretary-General (SG) Angel Gurría at the 31 st meeting of the International Monetary and Financial Committee (IMFC) held under IMF's aegis, "Policy efforts are also needed to encourage companies to deploy their large cash piles into productive investment. Tax reform and a quick and effective implementation of the G20/OECD Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS) initiative can help in this regard."

The Statement released on 18th April points out that BEPS Project is tackling gaps in international tax rules that enable multinational enterprises to exploit loopholes in the current rules and minimize their tax payments in both developed and developing countries.

It adds: "With eight of the fifteen actions still to be delivered by the end of this year, we will address some of the most egregious arrangements used by multinationals to separate their corporate profits from the location of their underlying economic activities."

As put by OECD SG, "The effort to fight against tax evasion and avoidance must continue apace. A total of 93 jurisdictions have committed themselves to implement the new global standard for Automatic Exchange of Information (AEOI) for tax purposes in either 2017 or 2018. In cooperation with the World Bank Group, the 126-country Global Forum on Transparency and Exchange of Information for Tax Purposes provides assistance to interested developing countries to implement and benefit from the automatic exchange standard. The OECD is also working to strengthen awareness and co-operate across government agencies on effective approaches to tackle illicit tax evasion, money laundering and bribery.

Tax simplification and extensions of social insurance coverage are among the measures that can help to tackle high rates of informality in many emerging economies."

According to the Statement, 2015 is a year for action on the international stage. The world urgently needs to make the shift to a low carbon economy. New OECD projections suggest that world GDP in 2060 may cumulatively shrink by between 0.7% and 2.5%, should global temperature increase between 1.5º and 4.5ºC.2 The UN process will be central in catalysing action and securing the necessary political will to finalise an ambitious, global legal climate agreement.

The OECD Green Growth Strategy highlights the importance of eliminating fossil fuel subsidies, introducing an appropriate price on carbon and removing barriers to the mobilisation of investment in green technologies. But these environmental policies won't be sufficient to achieve the transition to low carbon-economies.

Many other policies in areas including tax policy, regulatory policy, or urban planning also have an impact on the amount of carbon emitted as well as on cost and hence need to be aligned with our goal of achieving zero net emissions in the second half of this century.

Together with the International Energy Agency, the Nuclear Energy Agency and the International Transport Forum, OECD has launched a project to explicitly look at these non-environmental policies and see how they could be better aligned with the low-carbon transition.