Financial Transparency Coalition

The UK government must use the Open Government Partnership summit in London next week to end the secrecy surrounding who really owns millions of UK companies, campaigners said today. Discussions are underway right now at the highest levels of government and campaigners are expecting a decision to be made by the end of this week.

This blog post is the first post in a two-part series on the connection between extractive industries and corruption in developing countries. Natural resources, particularly fuels and ores, are often associated paradoxically with stagnant economic growth. More intuitively, natural resource wealth is also often associated with poorer governance, most notably corruption. Understanding why this is the case, however, is not necessarily intuitive. To that end, I’ll explore the correlational relationship between natural resource wealth and corruption in this post and show a model for examining these issues. Next week, I’ll use these theories to talk about some specific hypotheses explaining...

BERLIN - The well-publicised trial of Bo Xilai, a former politburo member and populist politician, for corruption and abuse of power does not prove China is serious about fighting corruption. Nor does it show that no one, not even a powerful politician, is above the rule of law. This elaborately choreographed prosecution is simply an exercise in demonstrating where power lies in an authoritarian state. In March Transparency International welcomed China’s strong commitment to fighting corruption and called on the authorities to take concrete steps to uphold best international practices for preventing and prosecuting corruption both at home and abroad....

According to Transparency International’s 2013 Global Corruption Barometer, Liberia ranked #1 in the world. And the Liberian population, with an outstanding 96%, believes that their legislature was corrupt. Global Financial Integrity estimates that the country lost an average of US$1 billion per year to illicit financial flows from 2001-2010. This comes despite Liberia’s President Sirleaf’s promise to “debilitate the cancer of corruption” in 2006.