Financial Transparency Coalition

The High Level Plenary meeting on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) will gather in the UN headquarters in New York from 20 to 22 September with a view to assess and accelerate progress towards the achievement of the MDGs. Prospects for such progress look gloomy since all MDGs are currently off-track. Heads of State and Government will need to move a step forwards and adopt ambitious commitments in order to meet the 2015 deadline. However, according to sources involved in the negotiation of the summit’s final outcome, this agreement is more likely to be a new compilation of abstract...

The Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and their Disposal requires countries to cooperate to achieve environmentally sound management of hazardous waste and builds a framework for controlling cross-border movements of waste. According to Convention requirements “every company or broker wishing to export hazardous wastes to ask the Government of the exporting State to provide prior written notification” to authorities in the importing State. The importing country must then give written consent before the export can take place. In addition, each approved shipment must be accompanied by a “movement document” that...

Illicit financial inflows and illicit financial outflows must be added together in order to accurately measure the adverse impact of these flows on developing economies, explains Dr. Dev Kar.

From Bloomberg:

China’s households hide as much as 9.3 trillion yuan ($1.4 trillion) of income that is not reported in official figures, with 80 percent accrued by the wealthiest people, a study showed. The money, much of it likely “illegal or quasi-illegal,” equates to about 30 percent of China’s gross domestic product, the study, conducted for Credit Suisse AG and published last week by the China Reform Foundation, found.