Beginning in the mid-1980s, the phenomenon of capital flight from developing countries received considerable attention in the economics literature. Capital flight destroys the domestic macroeconomic environment and decreases transparency and accountability. It restricts financial resources when a country is looking for economic growth and development. The purpose of this article is to measure t...

The international mobility of healthcare professionals is a well-documented phenomenon that has dynamic effects on global healthcare, labor markets, and the world economy. One aspect of this phenomenon—the movement of international medical graduates (IMGs) to the United States for residency training is often criticized because of the “brain drain” from their home countries. We propose a differe...

T he business environment is characterized by environmental and exogenous factors that affect company performance to the extent that it prevents managers from interacting effectively with a company. This study built on the literature on the ease of doing business and capital flight by empirically demonstrating the importance of business environments across different countries. To thi...

Capital flight often amounts to a substantial proportion of GDP in developing countries. This paper presents a portfolio choice model that relates capital flight to return differentials, risk aversion, and three types of risk: economic risk, political instability, and policy variability. Estimating the equilibrium capital flight equation for a panel of 45 developing countries over 16 years, all...

We study China’s illicit capital flow and document a change in its pattern. Specifically, we observe that China’s capital flight, especially the one measured by trade misinvoicing, exhibits a weakened response in the post-2007 period to the covered interest disparity, which is a theoretical determinant of capital flight. Further analyses indicate that the post-2007 behavior is influenced by qua...

This paper considers the role of corruption in impelling capital flight. Identifying corruption as one dimension of poor governance, the empirical analysis explores direct linkages between corruption and capital flight in a broad sample of countries. The novelty of this investigation is that it is based on a portfolio choice model of asset allocation that explicitly recognizes corruption as con...

There is no scarcity of empirical studies into the causes of capital flight or the associated attempt to relate the phenomenon to economic growth and other macroeconomic stability indicators. Studies that undertook that include Onwuoduokit, (2002), Ajayi (1992, 2002) Pastor (1990), among others. The emerging list of causal variables is equally diverse ranging from balance of payments disequilib...

This paper presents the methodology for the computation of capital flight and reports new estimates of the magnitude and timing of capital flight from 33 sub-Saharan African countries from 1970 to 2004. Our methodology calculates capital flight as the residual difference between inflows and outflows of foreign exchange recorded in the balance of payments, with corrections for the magnitude of e...

This book concerns capital flight in developing countries: How big is it? What causes it? How are we to interpret it? What are its effects? What can be done about it? The core of the book consists of seven case studies of capital flight from developing countries Turkey and a set of Middle Eastern and North African countries) connected by a common methodology used to estimate capital flight. The...