Dev Kar and Sarah Freitas, Illicit Financial Flows from Developing Countries Over the Decade Ending 2009, Global Financial Integrity, December 2011
Source ID
SRC-037
Citation
Dev Kar and Sarah Freitas, Illicit Financial Flows from Developing Countries Over the Decade Ending 2009, Global Financial Integrity, December 2011
URL or path
research/GFI Illicit Financial Flows Developing Countries 2000-2009.pdf
Type
Research institute report
Hierarchy tier
3
Published
2011-12
Accessed
2026-08-10
Snapshot
Retrieved from gfintegrity.org and opened 10 August 2026. 100 pages, text layer present, extracted alongside as .txt
Claims
CH2-002, CH2-003
Status
READ
Version history
The register keeps changing after the book is fixed in print. Each entry below was added to this row in the order shown.
RETIERED 11 August 2026 under D-028 against EVIDENCE_PROTOCOL's six-level source hierarchy. The previous value was an ad hoc quality score on an undocumented scale. Tier now records SOURCE TYPE only; how far this project has checked the document is the Status column. Previous value: tier 2. CONFIRMED. Table 9, Cumulative Normalized and Non-Normalized Illicit Financial Flows by Country 2000-2009, in millions of US dollars, gives Syria two figures: cumulative normalized (conservative) 15,288 and cumulative non-normalized (high-end) 23,641. The source manuscript's 15.3 billion and 23.6 billion are both correct, as is its more than fifty per cent, the ratio being 1.55. Method confirmed: the World Bank Residual model on change in external debt (CED) and the Gross Excluding Reversals trade mispricing model (GER). CORRECTS THE MANUSCRIPT, first limb. The manuscript states that neither the 23.6 billion nor the per-capita figure appears in the study itself. The 23,641 appears twice, in Tables 8 and 9. What is true, and narrower, is that Syria appears nowhere in the report's narrative: all 13 occurrences are in appendix tables, and the report makes no country finding about Syria at all. CONFIRMS THE MANUSCRIPT, second limb, and widens the search that proves it. The phrase per capita appears ZERO times in all 100 pages. The per-capita derivation is not GFI's arithmetic and is attributed to GFI by whoever performed it. CORRECTS THE MANUSCRIPT, and this one runs against the chapter's case. GFI does not treat the conservative figure as the proper one. Paragraphs 25 and 26 describe normalization as two conditional filters, a wrong-signs test and a threshold of ten per cent of exports f.o.b., and state that estimates not subjected to the filters provide the robust end of the range. The report then says normalization may further compound the downward bias inherent in the models, and that the paper includes the conservative range for purposes of comparison although, in its own words, the truth may lie much closer to the upper (non-normalized) end of the range. So quoting the 23.6 billion is closer to GFI's own view than quoting the 15.3 billion. The join failure that survives is printing either end of a published range without the other. CORRECTS THE MANUSCRIPT, third limb. The manuscript says the method does not measure theft and that GFI is careful about the distinction. GFI's own wording is that the CED component captures illicit transfers of the proceeds of bribery, THEFT, kickbacks and tax evasion, undifferentiated, while the GER component captures trade mispricing, which is not theft. So the aggregate contains theft and never separates it. The accurate charge is conflating a mixed aggregate with one of its components. NOT VERIFIED: the claim that the circulating figures come from the press release. The press release is a separate document and this project has not opened it