By E.J. Fagan, May 22, 2014
Welcome to the new gfintegrity.org! After seven long years, we have finally redesigned our website, with the help of some fantastic web designers and engineers. We are still working out the bugs and generating content, and would appreciate your feedback. To tell us what you think, Tweet us at @GFI_Tweets.
Our goal for gfintegrity.org is to create an engine for education and advocacy on illicit financial flows. Nearly a trillion dollars left developing countries last year illegally, resulting in tremendous amounts of economic and social damage. GFI believes that this represents the most harmful economic condition affecting the world’s poor. We hope this website helps us not only make that point, but help guide people to effective, pragmatic policy solutions to curtail illicit flows.
One way we’re doing that is using new graphs and visual aids from Datawrapper, which you will find throughout the site:
All of these graphs are interactive, and the data used to create them is embedded along with the graphics themselves.
By E.J. Fagan, May 21, 2014
On Friday, Global Financial Integrity hosted professors Michael Findley and Daniel Nielson to talk about their new book, Global Shell Games, Experiments in Transnational Relations, Crime, and Terrorism.
The book follows their ground-breaking paper, Global Shell Games: Testing Money Launderers’ and Terrorist Financiers’ Access to Shell Companies, which was published in 2012. The authors approached nearly 4,000 services in over 180 countries in a random assignment experience designed to measure how difficult it was to convince a corporate service provider or law firm to create a shell company without proper identification.
By Brian LeBlanc, May 2, 2014
There has been a lot of talk in recent years regarding the extent of China’s investment in the United States. Most of this has been centered on China’s admittedly large holdings of U.S. debt, but the fear has spilled over to other forms of investment as well. A 2012 report filed by the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, an entity created by Congress in 2000, went as far as recommending that the Committee on Foreign Investment in the US be amended to add a required litmus test for Chinese investment, specifically. This test would make it mandatory to analyze the “net economic benefit” of all proposed Chinese investment in the United States before it is approved.
Being fair, a lot of this has to do with national security, with the rational that Chinese acquisitions of telecommunication companies (for example) might pose a threat to the “cyber and physical infrastructure services critical to maintaining the national defense, continuity of government, economic prosperity, and quality of life in the United States.” How much of this is legitimate I’m not sure of.
Still, does China own an outsized portion of US assets compared to the rest of the world? The short answer is no, not even close.
By E.J. Fagan, May 1, 2014
Every year, more capital is transferred out of Africa than into the continent. This is despite billions of dollars of foreign aid, natural resource exports, and foreign direct investment:
