Financial Transparency Coalition

Have you ever heard someone really intelligent say something really wrong? I certainly have. It happens all the time. Smart people aren’t always right. Well, apparently, that’s also true of publications. The Economist, which self-identifies as a magazine for the highly intelligent, has (with perhaps a touch of good humor) claimed in its advertisements that it “makes white collars brighter” and called itself the “leaders digest.” While I don’t agree with many of its convictions, I more often than not respect its point of view. At the very least, I believe its articles are well-researched, carefully considered, and supported by...

In college we studied the so-called “resource curse:” the tragic observation that countries well-endowed with natural resources tend to have slower economic growth and poorer development than those without. I remember, very clearly, that we studied this concept as though it were a truism—a common and (mostly) irreversible reality that just was. This theory has, in fact, been demonstrated very strongly in quantitative terms. According to an analysis of developing countries by Jeffrey Sachs and Andrew Warner, the more an economy relies on mineral wealth, the lower its growth rate. Of course, in my classes, we also studied the drivers...

On September 7th, 1822 Prince Pedro, the Portuguese Prince of Brazil who represented the monarchy in the Brazilian colony, received a letter. It was from the Princess Maria Leopoldina, his wife, and it advised him to give the county its independence after nearly two years of rebellion. Prince Pedro heeded his wife’s advice . Later that day, standing on the shores of theIpirangaRiver in Sao Paolo, Pedro declared Brazil’s independence, ending 322 years of colonial rule. According to legend (and artistic recreations of the event) a very refined looking Pedro, dressed in a military suit, brandishing a...

Corruption costs China’s economy a pretty penny. A report from China’s own central bank estimates that “up to 18,000 corrupt officials and employees of state-owned enterprises” have absconded with 800 billion yuan, or $123 billion, of state money since the 1990s. In a recent speech given to celebrate China’s Communist Party’s nineteenth anniversary, President Hu Jintao specifically addressed the importance of “rampant corruption” and the impetus to create a “clean government.” And Minxin Pei, a former scholar for the Carnegie Endowment for Peace, estimates that China’s government loses as much as 10% of government spending in kickbacks and corruption,...