Financial Transparency Coalition

Recent news from Russia confirms that corruption is a serious issue that, unless curbed, can prevent the country from emerging as a global economic powerhouse. Corruption in Russia has been a hangover from the Soviet Union days. It is just that the forces of globalization have provided old hands and the up-and-coming younger generation of Russians with unprecedented opportunities to make money under the table. Of course, the exponential increase in Russia’s natural resource exports (such as petroleum products and natural gas) has not helped matters as far as overall governance is concerned. There is simply too much...

This morning, Larry Summers, former U.S. Treasury Secretary under President Clinton and former top economic advisor to President Obama, wrote that European austerity is holding back economic growth, which is making their sovereign debt problem worse, both in individual countries passing austerity budgets and on a continent-wide basis.

One of the main problems underlying the current crisis in the Eurozone is that the conditions set out in the Maastricht Treaty which lay the economic foundation of the zone are not congruent with the criteria needed to form an optimum currency area. The criteria under the Maastricht Treaty namely are (i) a rate of inflation no more than 1.5 percentage points higher than the average of three EU members with the lowest inflation rates (ii) a ratio of the annual government deficit to GDP not to exceed 3% at the end of the preceding fiscal year or...

New Global Financial Integrity Report Reveals Russia is Losing US$50 Billion Annually in Illicit Outflows

Recent news from Russia confirms that corruption is a serious issue that, unless curbed, can prevent the country from emerging as a global economic powerhouse. Corruption in Russia has been a hangover from the Soviet Union days. It is just that the forces of globalization have provided old hands and the up-and-coming younger generation of Russians with unprecedented opportunities to make money under the table. Of course, the exponential increase in Russia’s natural resource exports (such as petroleum products and natural gas) has...