Happy Holidays from Global Financial Integrity
By Raymond Baker, December 19, 2014
Dear Friends,
Best wishes for a wonderful holiday season.
At Global Financial Integrity, we’ve had another tremendously successful year. On the global stage, many countries are now planning to begin exchanging financial information automatically by the end of 2017 or 2018. Just this week, the European Union agreed to end the incorporation of anonymous companies with the EU. The global community is actively discussing whether a goal to reduce illicit financial flows should be included in the upcoming Sustainable Development Goals.
That said, as our flagship annual report—published this week—on illicit financial flows from developing countries shows, the developing world continues to lose US$1 trillion per year in illicit outflows, and they are growing at roughly twice the rate of global GDP. More must be done.
While GFI’s work has a tremendous impact, we have done all of this with only about 10 staff members and a very modest budget, which significantly hinders the impact that we can have. Just imagine what we could do with a larger budget to leverage our groundbreaking global economic research and policy advisory work with governments.