Financial Transparency Coalition

In a study conducted between November 2010 and February 2011 on ill-gotten money and the economy, the Financial Integrity team looked at the experiences of Malawi and Namibia. We approached the project with an open mind and without any assumptions, finding that for Malawi, corruption and tax evasion as a percentage of GDP represent a significant drag on economic development.

In this report, we first estimate the absolute size of a country's shadow economy based on its own published estimate of its GDP and recently-reported data on the size of shadow economies published by the world bank. This, and other data we use, is what we think the best currently available for the purpose of this report and, as such, should provide the best estimates possible. By the definition used here, economic activity in the shadow economy of a country will be tax-evading. So we next calculate an estimate of the amount of tax lost as a result of the...

How international pressure is helping to open up Switzerland, but more is needed to make a real dent in international poverty.

Two prominent advocacy groups have released major reports last week exposing unsettling truths about bribery and tax dodging schemes among large corporations in the United States and around the world. Berlin-based Transparency International published its annual Bribe Payers Index on Tuesday, ranking 28 countries on the perceived likelihood of bribery within their companies, followed only days later by the Corporate Tax Payers & Corporate Tax Dodgers 2008-2010 report by Citizens for Tax Justice and the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.