Financial Transparency Coalition

In less than two weeks New Yorkers will head to the polls to replace Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who has hit his term limit. In the race, Bill de Blasio, the Democratic candidate, is the clear frontrunner over Republican Joe Lhota by 64 percent to 23 percent. To voters, the campaign has centered on the economy and jobs, public education, and affordable housing—issues which all relate to major concerns over New York’s rising income inequality. In New York City income inequality is a huge concern. In fact, according to the Census Bureau, the income gap in the City is higher than...

Tom Cardamone, Managing Director of Global Financial Integrity, recently published a piece in Reuters on the connections between human rights and tax evasion. He references a recent report Tax Abuses, Poverty, and Human Rights, published by the International Bar Association’s Human Rights Institute (IBAHRI) Task Force on Illicit Financial Flows, Poverty, and Human Rights. The report finds that the evasion of taxes “has considerable negative impacts on the enjoyment of human rights.” The IBAHRI report goes beyond this connection, however. Developed nations, they write, have an "obligation to assess and address the domestic and international impacts of corporate, fiscal and...

The Democratic Republic of the Congo is widely considered one of the world’s nations with the highest levels of natural resource wealth. In particular, the nation is richly endowed with many types of mining industries—including copper, cobalt, gold, diamonds, and tin—and timber. In fact, DRC accounts for 51% of the world’s extraction of cobalt and is the world’s fourth largest producer of diamonds. Despite this wealth, and in part because of it, the country also has experienced conflict, economic instability, and systematic corruption since its independence in 1960. These dynamics have contributed to its status as the world’s poorest nation...

This blog post is the third post in a series on the connection between extractive industries and corruption in developing countries. You can read part one here and part two here. In a blog post two weeks ago, I discussed the relationship between extractive industries and corruption, noting that while they are related, the presence of extractive industries alone does not inherently lead to their political exploitation. Rather, it is the effect that these industries have on other economic and political conditions that can drive corruption. Last week, I introduced a few alternative hypotheses that explain the connection between extractive...