Brazil: Capital Flight, Illicit Flows, and Macroeconomic Crises, 1960-2012
Brazil: Capital Flight, Illicit Flows, and Macroeconomic Crises, 1960-2012 Dev Kar September 2014 Brazil: Capital Flight, Illicit Flows, and Macroeconomic Crises, 1960-2012 Dev Kar1 September 2014 Global Financial Integrity Wishes to Thank the Ford Foundation for Supporting this Project 1. Dev Kar is Global Financial Integrity’s Chief Economist, having formerly served as a Senior Economist at the International Monetary Fund. Brian LeBlanc assisted with the data analysis, and Joshua Simmons contributed to the policy analysis. Raymond Baker, Christine Clough, Clark Gascoigne, Taylor Le, Channing May, and Melissa O’Brien also supported this project. We are pleased to present here our report, Brazil: Capital Flight, Illicit Flows, and Macroeconomic Crises, 1960-2012. Illicit financial outflows averaged US$14.7 billion per year for the period from 2000 to 2009. For the period from 2010 to 2012, illicit financial outflows increased to an average of US$33.7 billion per year. These outflows constitute about 1.5 percent of Brazil’s growing GDP for both of these periods. In terms of total magnitude, the country is seventh among developing countries, all of which suffer from this phenomenon. GFI’s analysis is based on data filed by Brazil with the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, enabling a breakdown of unrecorded outflows into balance of payments leakages and trade misinvoicing. Balance of payments leakages have across the decades generally been on the order of 10 to 20 percent of the total, meaning that trade misinvoicing generally accounts for 80 to 90 percent of the drainage of capital from the country.
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