Financial Transparency Coalition

Reuter's David Cay Johnston wrote on Richard Murphy and Tax Justice Network's report on worldwide tax evasion this week. The best part? An excellent graphic of the top-10 countries by amount of tax evasion, set up against the size of their informal economies.

Today, Global Financial Integrity released our newest report, Illicit Financial Flows from Developing Countries Over the Decade Ending 2009. In the report, we found that despite the global financial crisis and subsequent drop in international trade and foreign direct investment, illicit financial flows still approached US$1 trillion out of the developing world. This represents a decline from the US$1.55 trillion we estimated flowed out of the developing world in 2008, but still represents a horrible tragedy for developing countries.

In July of this year the World Bank Group took a big step forward in the field of illicit financial flows with its 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 this year, particularly in the wake of the Arab Spring. Ben Ali of Tunisia, Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, and Muammar Qaddafi of Libya all hid millions of dollars abroad, money that was frozen and publicized soon after revolutions began in...

According to an upcoming report that estimates the magnitude of illicit money leaving developing countries, the Philippines lost US$142 billion between 2000 and 2009. The amount of illicit money that left the economy puts the Philippines in the top 15 countries in outflows during the period. The report, titled Illicit Financial Flows from Developing Countries Over the Decade ending 2009, will be published by Washington, DC-based research group Global Financial Integrity on December 15.