Financial Transparency Coalition

WASHINGTON, DC—As drug violence in Mexico spirals out of control, a new blog post published today on the website of the Task Force on Financial Integrity & Economic Development reveals the Mexican economy is losing over US$50 billion per year in illicit financial outflows. Citing data from GFI’s forthcoming report, Illicit Financial Flows from Developing Countries: 2000-2009, Global Financial Integrity Economist Karly Curcio states that, between 2000 and 2008, total illicit financial outflows from Mexico totaled US$462 billion.

Forthcoming Global Financial Integrity Report Finds Mexican Economy Lost Over US$460 billion between 2000 and 2008 Mexico is struggling with some serious economic and political threats to stability. Drug cartels, corruption, and lower confidence in Mexican markets are eating away at prospects for economic growth. As Mexico teeters closer to a failed state, threats to U.S. national security rise commensurately. Mexican efforts at improving governance are falling short, and billions of dollars in illegal money are flying out of the country each year. In August of 2010, Mexican authorities fired almost 10 percent of the federal police force trying to...

In August 2010, the bodies of 72 immigrants were discovered in Tamaulipas, a state in northeastern Mexico. While nobody knows the sequence of events that led to this massacre, it is well known that Tamaulipas is at the center of a turf war between two powerful drug cartels, the Zetas and the Gulf Cartel. Control of territory and trafficking routes is critical as it enables the cartels to expand their criminal operations to include other moneymaking endeavors like fuel bunkering, prostitution, kidnapping, and even software piracy. Across the Atlantic, a recent report for the Council of Europe...

Aid doesn’t work. It’s a statement I hear a lot. Development aid often gets siphoned off by corruption. Aid in the form of money is inefficient, often getting lost in red tape and bureaucratic mess, while those in need see nearly none of it. Aid in the form of goods encourages dependency. Almost in response, private sector capitalists have responded with microfinance. Indeed, the microfinance has seemed like an answer to this conundrum. It the free-market’s response to one of the most difficult questions in development economics: how can we help without undermining the very goal we...