PARIS, Aug 31: President Jacques Chirac will tell the Johannesburg summit on Monday that the industrialised nations should voluntarily apply the Tobin tax to their financial transactions, with a view to financing a greater flow of developmental assistance to the world’s poorest countries, according to an Elysee Palace source on Sunday.

The Tobin Tax is named after James Tobin, the American Nobel Prize (1981) laureate in Economics.

In the estimation of Mr Chirac, the Tobin Tax, would be an excellent way of coming up with the $100 billion worth of public aid for development that the IMF says is necessary, if the world is to start eradicating poverty worldwide. Given daily financial flows in the Western world of the order of $1.5 trillion, Mr Chirac feels, said the source, that it would take an infinitesimal tax to come up with the funds initially needed to set in motion more effective efforts at controlling, and eventually eradicating, world poverty.