Disruptive Think Tank
NITE TANZARN IntellectNest Disruptive Think Tank is a dynamic and bold platform dedicated to challenging conventional narratives and fostering innovative solutions to pressing social issues. By bringing together diverse minds, it creates a space where unconventional thinking thrives, leading to practical, sustainable, and transformative change.
Rethinking Tax
What counts as economic activity?
A woman wakes before dawn. She fetches water. She cooks. She cleans. She cares for children, the sick, the elderly. She works in the market. She returns. She repeats.
Much of this work remains outside conventional measures of economic activity. It remains absent from national accounts, undervalued in labour statistics, and disconnected from formal recognition within tax systems.
The economy depends on it. The tax system ignores it.
What counts as economic activity is not a neutral question. It is a political decision about whose labour is valued and whose is erased.
The economy rests upon another economy. One is measured. The other sustains it.
Explore the deeper analysis:
→ What Is Not Counted Does Not Count
→ The Economic Ghost: The Contribution the System Cannot See
Rethinking Tax
Who is the imagined taxpayer?
Tax systems are built around an implicit model: a formal worker with stable income, continuous employment, individual earnings, and economic independence.
Historically, that model has reflected male employment patterns more than the realities of most women's economic lives.
Women move between paid work, unpaid care, informal enterprise, self‑employment, subsistence production, and community labour. Millions of livelihoods do not fit the categories upon which tax systems were built.
The problem is not that women fail to fit the model. The model fails to fit reality.
The system was designed for an exception. It treats the majority as deviation.
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Rethinking Tax
What is taxation designed to do?
Conventional tax debates begin with revenue. A feminist understanding begins with life.
Before people earn income, they must be born. Fed. Cared for. Educated. Healed. Transported. Protected. Every tax system rests upon these foundations, even when it does not recognise them.
Taxation does not eliminate these responsibilities. It determines how they are shared.
A functioning tax system allows societies to organise many of these responsibilities collectively through public investment. When it works, responsibility is shared. When it fails, responsibility returns – not equally, not randomly – to those who already carry the work of sustaining life.
Taxation is not simply about raising revenue. It is about organising society.
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Rethinking Tax
The tax that is paid more than once
She pays through taxation. She pays through private costs when public systems fail. She pays again through unpaid labour and lost time.
The first payment enters public revenue. The second payment never appears in public accounts. The third payment – her labour – remains invisible altogether.
This is the double payment burden.
When public provision fails, taxpayers pay twice.
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Rethinking Tax
What should tax justice measure?
Tax justice is usually measured through collection: revenue, compliance, tax-to-GDP ratios, administrative efficiency.
These indicators matter. They are not enough. They are incomplete.
A feminist understanding of tax justice asks different questions. Does taxation reduce unpaid care? Does it reduce time poverty? Does it reduce the private costs of sustaining life? Does it expand economic opportunity? Does it strengthen substantive equality?
Revenue measures what governments collect. Tax justice measures what societies become.
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Rethinking Tax
Who built the tax system?
The tax systems we inherited were built around economic assumptions that did not account for women's realities. They emerged through colonial administration, patriarchal institutions, and economic models that separated production from reproduction, markets from care, and taxation from everyday life.
We refuse that inheritance. Not because history can be undone. Because institutions can be redesigned.
The tax system was built by power. It can be redesigned by power.
The tax system was built by power. It can be redesigned by power.
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