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History and overview of ‘IFF’

This chapter provides a history of the rise of the term ‘illicit financial flows’ (IFF), and the emergence since 2000 of a global tax justice movement. As a broad umbrella term, the phrase was useful in ensuring the political consensus behind the establishment of a target to curtail IFF in the UN Sustainable Development Goals. But that consensus has hidden, to some extent, disagreements over the relative priorities—from the old view of corruption as a problem predominantly of lower-income countries, to the more recent recognition of the central role of typically high-income financial secrecy jurisdictions. Disagreements over political priority have played out as disputes over the definition of IFF, and over the quality of estimates of scale. This chapter provides a comprehensive typology of IFF, and summarises the evidence on the importance of the phenomenon for human development.