Illicit financial flight is the unrecorded movement of capit

Illicit financial flight is the unrecorded movement of capital out of a country in contravention of the regulations of that country. The main mechanism used to undertake this is multinational companies shifting their tax liabilities to sister companies located in low tax jurisdictions, also known as profit shifting. During 1980–2009, 12% of Sierra Leone\'s GDP is thought to have left the country each year through illicit financial flight. Each year the Government of Sierra Leone allocates $25 million on health and $32 million on education. Why would a country where 53% of the how to make dilutions live below the poverty line and the under-5 mortality rate is 161 per 1000 livebirths, choose to spend $244 million (ie, 10 times the health budget) to give tax incentives to foreign companies and organisations?
In June, 2014, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria completed its support for operations in China. The 10-year partnership between China and the Fund measurably improved China\'s management of the three diseases, but it also created benefits that extend far beyond the metrics usually used to assess public health programmes. These benefits include deeper engagement with civil society organisations, stronger public health systems, and the implementation of innovative approaches for disease management. As China celebrates these achievements, it must also devise a roadmap for continuing its record of success, now that the Fund has left.
There are several factual inaccuracies in the Comment by Alexander Kentikelenis and colleagues. First, it is not correct to say that health-care expenditures have declined in Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Liberia. As Benedict Clements, Masahiro Nozaki, and I note in a recent blog, spending on health and education have increased faster in low-income countries with programmes supported by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) than in those without. According to IMF estimates, in Guinea, spending increased by 0·7 percentage points from 2010 to 2013, in Liberia by 1·6 points, and in Sierra Leone by 0·24 points. More generally, World Bank data show that health outcomes in sub-Saharan Africa, including the three Ebola-hit countries, have improved significantly over the past decade or so, including improvements in mortality rates (falling by about 30%), child nutrition, defined as the proportion of children aged younger than 5 years whose weight for age is more than 2 SD below the median for the international reference population ages 0–59 months (improving by 9%), and sanitation (improving by 9%). Second, it is simply not correct to say that the IMF requires caps on the public-sector wage bill. In 2007, the IMF announced a , as part of an overall effort to promote more effective and sustainable use of aid flows to low-income countries. In fact, IMF programmes in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone have not had any limits on the wage bill during the period 2000–14.
Despite the use of similar source data, studies have yielded different conclusions about the association between economic growth and childhood undernutrition. Two groups with particularly divergent perspectives engaged in an exchange of Correspondence (September issue) debating whether the association exists at all.
Anna Bershteyn and colleagues provide a useful comparison of estimates of the association between economic growth and early childhood undernutrition in our study with those of previous studies. Their comparative exercise supports our key conclusion that the contribution of economic growth to the reduction in early childhood undernutrition in low-income and middle-income countries is very small. We had already reported both absolute and relative changes in our study (tables 2 and 3) underlining that absolute changes are much smaller than relative ones. Specifications with individual-level control variables, which are important for the reduction of bias of the estimates, show even smaller coefficients than those reported by Bershteyn and colleagues. The use of year fixed effects is also important to control for factors that are unrelated to the effect of economic growth; in that sense, we stand by their use which, as Bershteyn and colleagues show, also leads to smaller estimates.