PERI-Carnegie Research Project

PERI-Carnegie-Corporation of New York Research Project on: Capital Flight from Africa and Perverse Global Connections

As a 2021 Andrew Carnegie Fellow, Léonce Ndikumana received a generous grant from Carnegie Corporation of New York to support a research project on “Capital Flight from Africa and Perverse Global Connections: Evidence and Possible Solutions.” The project undertakes a quantitative assessment of capital flight, its mechanisms and impacts in three selected African countries – Cameroon, Ghana, and Zambia. It engages a historical and an institutional analysis of aspects of the global trade and financial systems that facilitate capital flight from these three countries. The analysis focuses on natural resource sectors in these countries to explore the extent to which these sectors are exposed to capital flight notably through trade misinvoicing, profit-shifting by multinational corporations that dominate the sectors, weaknesses in the domestic regulatory systems, and structural flaws in the global trade and financial systems. This project builds on previous country level analysis of capital flight, notably the studies on Angola, Côte d’Ivoire, and South Africa published in the volume edited Ndikumana and Boyce (2022) – On the Trail of Capital Flight from Africa: The Takers and the Enablers.

This Working Paper series presents the results from this project.