Financial Transparency Coalition

Poverty ain’t what it used to be, nor for that matter where it used to be either. As the nature and location of poverty continues to change, the illicit financial flows agenda becomes all the more important for development. Historically, the vast majority of people living on less than a dollar a day (or $1.25, where the World Bank’s line is now drawn) did so in low-income countries (LICs); that is, in countries with per capita gross national incomes less than $1005. So: income-poor people lived in income-poor countries. Simples. And true: twenty years ago, 93% of those in...

LONDON – Global Witness welcomes today’s implementation of the UK Bribery Act which, if enforced correctly, will help curb corruption and end poverty around the world. But the group warns that the government will need to provide the necessary resources to effectively enforce the act if its anti-corruption credentials are to be taken seriously.

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...

The initial swell of enthusiasm for microfinance has somewhat subsided recently, as an elegantly simple idea founders on the rocks of reality. Despite the early successes of projects such as Muhammad Yunus’s Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, billions of people from Dhaka to the Dominican Republic remain shut out of the global financial system. The scarcity of credit available to the world’s poorest is still a significant impediment to ending global poverty. The current crisis in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh is a case in point. A rash of defaults- and even suicides- among borrowers have led to...