The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions

by Jason Hickel

According to the World Bank, corruption in the forms of bribery and theft by government officials, the main target of the UN Convention, costs developing countries between $20 billion and $40 billion each year.9 That’s a lot of money – and this figure is certainly large enough to warrant our attention as an obstacle to development. But if we broaden our view a little bit and put this figure into perspective, a very different story emerges. As it turns out, this kind of corruption is an extremely small proportion – only about 3 per cent – of the total illicit flows that leak out of the developing world each year. By contrast, the Washington-based Global Financial Integrity (GFI) calculates that up to 65 per cent of total illicit outflows have to do with corruption of a very different sort: commercial tax evasion.10 And when we look at commercial tax evasion, the neat corruption narrative that Transparency International tells begins to fall apart.