Financial Transparency Coalition

At the age of 15 I moved away from home to live at the Olympic Training Center in Lake Placid, New York, where I lived and trained year-round for the sport of sprint kayaking. Surrounded by some of the country’s finest athletes through most of my formidable years taught me a lot about who athletes are and how they think. Honor was paramount to (almost) everyone of them—whether they were bobsledders or speed skaters, ski jumpers or rhythmic gymnasts. Everyone wanted to achieve their best performance, everyone wanted to make the team or win the race,...

Recently I wrote a post on illegal logging—a type of illicit financial flow—and the practice’s adverse effects on development. I noted that as with other, more widely understood, types of illicit financial flows, illegal trans-boundary logging can undermine political legitimacy, rob developing countries of tax revenue, and exacerbate conflicts. Moreover this practice can rob developing countries of a resource that—unlike drugs and minerals—has value even as it remains stationary, as 1.2 billion people depend on forests for wood, fuel, fodder and food. One reason deforestation and loss of biodiversity are such alarming problems is that the full costs...

International consensus on almost any policy usually happens step by (excruciating) step. Even reforms that seem obvious in retrospect, like the international laws with respect to bribery and foreign corruption, are initiated by a pioneer (in this case the U.S. in 1977), but take years or even decades for the international community to follow suit. One poignant example is the case of women’s suffrage, which originated in France in the late 1700s, but didn’t take its first big step until the early 1900s, when Australia and Finland granted their citizens universal suffrage. Even with these early...

When it comes to illegal, transboundary smuggling, the study of illicit financial flows generally focuses on problems that are on a massive scale worldwide, for example the illegal drug trade, smuggling of precious metals and gems, and human trafficking. On these subjects, there is a wealth of literature and organizations devoted to understanding and eradicating their damaging effects on development. There are other types of illicit cross-boarder movements of goods, however, which are not discussed as widely, but which may be just as harmful to development. One example is illegal logging, a practice which strips developing countries of a...