Financial Transparency Coalition

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...

Compared to some of the countries in the neighborhood, Uganda is doing pretty well. Directly to the West lies the Democratic Republic of the Congo, ranked by Foreign Policy as the world’s fourth most failed state. With a per capita GDP of $189, it is one of the poorest nations in the world. In the last ten years, it has fallen into near chaos, with many areas lacking law, order, electricity, and medicine. Directly to the North of Uganda lies South Sudan, the world’s newest nation, which despite outward promises remains in a fearsome political deadlock with its northern...

Publish What You Pay and Eurodad have launched a briefing paper (PDF) calling on the EU to propose legally binding measures to require natural resource companies to publish key financial information for each country and project in which they operate. In recent months, civil society groups working on financial transparency and on tax and development have actively engaged the European Commission and other European institutions responsible for drafting key legislative and non-legislative proposals that will potentially reform European financial reporting standards. This paper aims to contribute to the current debate...