Commitment to Development Index: rich countries still disappoint

From the Center for Global Development:

"Wealthy countries have a long way to go to improve policies that support shared global prosperity, according to a Center for Global Development (CGD) index published today."

The index is here.

There is much that is of interest in this report, but here we will merely highlight one section that interests us in particular:

"The way the Index is calculated continues to improve as new data become available and in response to changes in understanding of the ways that rich countries’ policies affect development.

In response to growing concern about problems associated with financial secrecy, including corruption and illicit financial flows, a new finance component replaces the investment component and includes for the first time data from the Financial Secrecy Index. 

Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Spain, and Poland have the highest scores in the finance component because of their transparent financial sectors, support to investment in developing countries, and membership in the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI). Switzerland, with its tradition of banking secrecy, ranks at the bottom."

(A growing number of organisations, in fact, are using our index. Here is another recent joiner in the last few days: the OECD's Bribery and Corruption Awareness Handbook.)

The media response to our Financial Secrecy Index has been enormous, and we are confident that its influence will continue to grow. The next one comes out in 2015.