Capital Flight from poor countries: new report

http://taxjustice..com/2008/05/capital-flight-from-poor-countries-new.html

A new report has just been published on capital flight out of poor countries, compiled and published by the non-governmental groups Eurodad, WEED, CRBM and the Bretton Woods Project. As the report says:

"The media is full of the credit crunch, write-downs by private banks and dramatic price rises. There is discussion of how these incidents are spilling over across the economy in the U.S.A., Europe and elsewhere, with people losing their homes and jobs and struggling to provide meals for their families. Very little attention is given to the specific impacts in the world’s poorest countries. Yet global financial stability – like climate change – is a key global challenge and one that the current financial and regulatory system is ill-equipped to handle."

It also points out that:

"The financial system is not only unstable, it is also unjust, resources are flowing from poorer to richer. Experts estimate that every year $500 - $800 billion leave Southern countries due to criminal activities, tax evasion, and corruption. This makes South-North financial flows several times higher than the average $90 billion annual aid flows, the $240 billion foreign direct investment to the South and the couple of hundreds of billions of dollars of remittances transferred from migrants."

Take a look: the report is available here, and it is accompanied by a fact sheet, which is here. More generally, most of the main reports and publications of interest to TJN are available in a relatively new, and expanding, archive.