Financial Transparency Coalition

Classification is important—in any discipline. Classification of symptoms helps doctors determine the correct treatment for patients. It helps us pick out the right book in a library, settle on the appropriate sentence for a convict, and compare species of plants. For similar reasons, researchers collect countries into groups based on a variety of metrics that define prosperity. These systems allow us to compare gains in development, to better understand how gains in development can be achieved, and determine appropriate aid packages. It isn’t always easy because there isn’t any one parameter that successfully defines wealth or prosperity.

Tom Friedman has often—and correctly—observed that Americais undermining its own fight against terrorism through its dependence on oil. In case you haven’t heard the argument, here’s how it goes. Americaimports about 1,100,000 barrels of oil and petroleum from Saudi Arabia every day. With crude oil’s current price of about $100 per barrel, there’s a lot of money flowing out of America’s pockets to the Saudis. And what does Saudi Arabia do with all of this wealth? Well, we know what it does with a part of it. As Friedman has pointed out: …private Saudi donors today still constitute the most...

Big step forward for the World Bank today. After an arguably rocky history with the topic of illicit financial flows, one which is full of fits and starts, the World Bank has taken a large stride into the foray with a new, 196-page report: Barriers to Asset Recovery. The study explicitly concerns reforms that will “enable the recovery of stolen assets” as the result of corruption. It is a topic which has been given a fair amount of attention lately, particularly in the wake of the Arab Spring. Ben Ali of Tunisia, Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, and Muammar Qaddafi...

China has had problems with bribery, corruption, and illicit financial flows for years. In fact illicit outflows from the People’s Republic of Chinahave ranged from an annual US$169 billion in 2000 to US$344 billion in 2008. The country is also, by far, the largest transmitter of illicit financial flows in the developing world. And in case it’s not already obvious, let me clarify that these numbers are unbelievably large. For a point of comparison, the PRC’s stock of total external debt in 2008 was $378 billion, just slightly greater than its total illicit outflows in that year alone. Corruption also...