Financial Transparency Coalition

A certain number of tools have been developed over the past two decades to enhance corporate or governmental transparency. Anticorruption prevention tools, integrity pacts, and good reporting or disclosure practices were adopted by a certain number of corporations, governments or public institutions, those being individual players in the global economy. Yet the 2008 crisis has shown that many individual commitments or right behaviors were not enough when a few uncontrolled players could put the entire system at considerable risk and threaten economic development for several years.

India has begun the trail for money allegedly stashed away in secret bank accounts in tax havens. Finance minister Pranab Mukherjee on Friday told delegates at the Hindustan Times Leadership Summit that has India has written to 78 countries for amending existing tax treaties insisting on the adding Article 26 of OECD's Model Tax Convention.

On a nasty Belgian back-room move to suppress European financial transparency. But first, some background. The European Union's savings tax directive is an excellent idea: governments automatically report to each other, on a multilateral basis, the income-generating assets of each other's citizens, so that those governments can tax them properly. Unfortunately, it is full of loopholes - punched in the directive as a result of efforts by the likes of Luxembourg, Austria and the United Kingdom to preserve as much secrecy as possible in the financial sector. Recently, some in the EU have been...

When it comes to policy change, what should come first: financial regulation or corporate responsibility? I have argued for corporate responsibility—morality, in fact—before. My conclusion was that corporations, like people, do have the duty to act morally. I argued that there is such a thing as moral behavior when it comes to business and when we, as consumers, should reflect our own brands of morality in our purchasing decisions. The same thing should be true of investing. And when it comes to these funds, some firms have already led the way with “socially responsible” investment firms. Members...