From OECD Financial Secrecy to African Child Mortality: new paper

Hot on the heels of the OECD's concession that its members are involved in an 'appalling' failure to tackle dirty money flows, we now note a new paper in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine on the potential impact of illicit flows on the time taken to reach the child mortality target in the Millennium Development Goals across sub—Saharan Africa. (This target, in the jargon, is known as MDG4.)

This blog post from the Center for Global Development picks up details from the paper, entitled "The effect of illicit financial flows on time to reach the fourth Millennium Development Goal in Sub-Saharan Africa: a quantitative analysis." As the blog notes:

"We take leading estimates of illicit flows, and consider the mortality implications if the lost capital were instead retained within official GDP, using previous studies that establish the relationship between GDP and mortality.

The figure shows how much quicker countries would achieve the child mortality reduction target from the Millennium Development Goals, were illicit flows to be curtailed. For sub-Saharan Africa as a whole, the target could be reached by 2016 – rather than 2029 on current trends."

And the results, as the graph shows, are admittedly imprecise - but horrifying in their implications. Now read on.

Update 2014: for further resources on inequality and democracy see here.