Financial Transparency Coalition

The summit between leaders of the world’s wealthiest economies will get underway next week in Northern Ireland. British Prime Minister David Cameron, leading the summit, has put three things at the top of his agenda: trade, tax, and transparency. There are a lot of issues directly relevant to the Financial Transparency Coalition in there, and I don’t have time to address them all, but one of the most promising, and interesting, is Cameron’s commitment to improving information on beneficial ownership of companies via public registries. Anonymity is prevalent under the world’s status quo. It is exceptionally easy (and relatively cheap)...

That Africa is poor is assumed, but rarely well explained. Generally, we—both in terms of those who study these issues and collectively as a society—have accepted the fact that Africa is underdeveloped. Yet this conclusion is neither forgone nor self-evident. Even more infuriating, it is often explained, but never sufficiently explained. That is, there are a lot of competing theories on the subject, but most fail to give a complete picture. Of course, it’s a complicated issue, so it makes sense that no one theory would prove universal. Yet, even with intense academic scrutiny, the picture is incomplete.

The solutions to problems are often implicit in the way they are framed. If I tell you my car won’t start, you might tell me to consult a mechanic. If, on the other hand, I tell you I can’t find my keys, well, we have a completely different problem. In public policy, frames can often conflate symptoms with causes, other times, such as with the example I gave, they just obscure a possible solution. But frames turn out to be fundamentally important to the problems’ solutions. As Albert Einstein once said, “If I had an hour to solve a problem...

The U.S. government is not unfamiliar with short-sighted policies, indeed short-sightedness in political systems often seems often more familiar than not. Yet of all the short-sighted policies the United States has engaged in, and especially of those overseas, the recent reports on ghost money in Afghanistan take the cake. I wish I could say I was surprised. According to a report by the New York Times, the Central Intelligence Agency has literally been dropping off “bags of cash” at Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai’s office for decades. Karzai called the amounts “small,” but evidence indicates the amounts are anything but—perhaps totaling tens...