Trade-Related Illicit Financial Flows in Developing Asia (2013–2022)
March 26, 2026
Illicit financial flows (IFFs) are most commonly understood as money or value that crosses borders and is illegal in its source, transfer, or use. These flows matter for development and governance because they can weaken domestic resource mobilization, reduce tax revenue, and constrain the fiscal space required for public services and infrastructure investment. The international policy community has increasingly treated the reduction of IFFs as a concrete development objective. A prominent channel for trade-related IFF risk is trade misinvoicing, which is defined as the fraudulent misreporting of key invoice information (including price and quantity, among other attributes) for the purpose of facilitating illicit cross-border financial flows. One widely used approach for identifying misinvoicing risk at scale is “mirror trade” or partner-country analysis, which compares what two trading partners each report about the same trade flow and flags persistent discrepancies (value gaps) as potential indicators of misinvoicing. This report therefore examines trade-related IFF risks in Developing Asia through the lens of trade value gaps derived from partner-reported discrepancies in official trade data. The analysis draws on GFI’s longstanding value gap approach, which uses United Nations trade statistics to estimate the order of magnitude of trade misinvoicing risks across large samples of countries and years. In the Developing Asia results used for this report, estimated trade value gaps are substantial and appear to have increased over the 2013 to 2022 period, reaching approximately US$1.69 trillion in 2022.