Articles
Tackling illicit capital flows from Africa
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Following the 2015 report of the High Level Panel on Illicit Financial Flows from Africa, chaired by the former South African President Thabo Mbeki, there has been much greater awareness across Africa of the magnitude of illicit financial flows and their implications.1 Now, more than ever, policymakers at the national, regional and global levels must address the core issues surrounding illicit financial flows, which reduce Africa’s ability to finance its development: unfavourable natural-resource governance models, tax avoidance and tax havens, as well as weak national financial institutions. The upcoming Third International Conference on Financing for Development, to take place in Addis Ababa from 13 to 16 July 2015, is an important opportunity to address illicit financial flows, their drivers and the resulting governance challenges.
Who's afraid of the Asian Infrastructure Development Bank?
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This week, Germany, France, Italy, and the U.K. all signed up to join the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. The AIIB, a Chinese-led multilateral fund with about $50 billion in capital to invest in public infrastructure, is opposed by the U.S. because it will compete with institutions where America has considerably more influence—organizations such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. An Obama administration official complained about “constant accommodation” of China by the U.S.’s European allies, and the president’s National Security Council issued a statement expressing concern over the AIIB’s environmental and governance standards.
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Why is Africa underdeveloped?
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Kingsley Moghalu, former Deputy Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, believes that Africa’s development potential lies in the hands of Africans themselves and that underdevelopment is due to the lack of a suitably ambitious worldview. He lays out his ideas in his book Emerging Africa and, in our latest CGD podcast, Moghalu expands on the lessons learned from his time in office in Nigeria and on Africa’s development future as a whole.
The IMF's Role inn the Ebola Crisis
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As 2015 began, the world received a sobering message. Not only have the number of Ebola cases exceeded 20,000, but in some affected countries, especially Sierra Leone, the virus is still spreading. The death toll now tops 8,000 and the usual answers to how this outbreak got so huge so quickly – poverty, bad governance, cultural practices, endemic disease in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone – are giving way to a deeper questioning of the poor public health response. Critics are turning to the structural causes of weak health systems and increasingly showing that international lending policies, including and especially those employed by the IMF, should carry much of the blame.
Message from Alexis Tsipras to the World Social Forum
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Dear friends and comrades,
Fourteen years ago, at the beginning of the new millennium, the World Social Forum came to the fore as the response of the people to the globalization of the markets. It was deliberately meant as versatile meeting of movements, trade unions and associations from around the world, looking for progressive solutions to global problems: poverty, social inequality, lack of democracy, racism, environmental destruction, and absence of economic and social justice. By using dialogue among equals, as well as horizontal processes, it provided proof that social forces from different parts of the world, which may be militant against different problems, can still converge around common goals and so formulate an alternative vision and blueprint for the planet. With values like these, condensed in such slogans as "people before profits" and "another world is possible", the World Social Forum was the space in which ideas and modes of action were born and grew which would eventually question the global neoliberal supremacy.
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