Financial Transparency Coalition

It’s not often that the G20, the summit of the leaders of the world’s biggest economies, is merely a preamble to a European meeting. But this week it is. When the world’s leaders met in Los Cabos, Mexico they had one thing on their mind: Europe. And while the leaders of the G20 had a lot to say about the European debt crisis, the real test, and the real action, will happen in Brussels next week, where we expect the European Council to agree to an action plan. In Mexico, European leaders hinted at how this plan might look: a...

Task Force Economist Advisory Board member Dr. Léonce Ndikumana launched his book, Africa's Odious Debts: How Foreign Loans and Capital Flight Bled a Continent, today at the Brookings Institute.

Three public events featuring Task Force members will be held over the next week.

Too often, borrowed monies are salted away from Africa’s most impoverished nations to offshore banks through inflated contracts or kickbacks. The complexities and bank-secrecy laws of the international finance system, combined with a lack of enforcement, assist such transfers, contend James K. Boyce and Léonce Ndikumana, authors of Africa’s Odious Debts: How Foreign Loans and Capital Flight Bled a Continent. They point to a correlation between foreign borrowing and capital flight: “For every dollar of foreign borrowing in sub-Saharan Africa, on average more than 50 cents leaves the borrower country in the same year.” Capital flight from sub-Saharan Africa...