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The ninth annual Amartya Sen Prize

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This year, Global Financial Integrity, Academics Stand Against Poverty, and Yale’s Global Justice Program will be awarding the ninth annual Amartya Sen Prizes to the two best original essays examining one particular component of illicit financial flows, the resulting harms, and possible avenues of reform. Essays should be about 7,000 to 9,000 words long. There is a first prize of USD 5,000 and a second prize of USD 3,000. Winning essays must be available for publication in Journal Academics Stand Against Poverty.

Illicit financial flows are explicitly recognized as an obstacle to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals and singled out as target #4 of SDG 16. They are defined as cross-border movements of funds that are illegally earned, transferred, or used – such as funds earned through illegal trafficking in persons, drugs or weapons; funds illegally transferred through mispriced exchanges (e.g., among affiliates of a multinational firm seeking to shift profits to reduce taxes); goods misinvoiced or funds moved in order to evade taxes; and funds used for corruption of or by public or corporate officials.

Components of illicit financial flows can be delimited by sector or geographically. Delimitation by sector might focus your essay on some specific activity, business or industry – such as art, real estate, health care, technology, entertainment, shipping, weapons, agriculture, sports, gaming, education, politics, tourism, natural resource extraction, banking and financial services – or on an even narrower subsector such as the diamond trade, hunting, insurance, or prostitution. Delimitation by geography might further narrow the essay’s focus to some region, country, or province.

Your essay should describe the problematic activity and evaluate the adverse effects that make it problematic. You should estimate, in quantitative terms if possible, the magnitude of the relevant outflows as well as the damage they do to affected institutions and populations. This might include harm from abuse, exploitation and impoverishment of individuals, harm through subdued economic activity and reduced prosperity, and/or harm through diminished tax revenues that depress public spending.

Your essay should also explain the persistence of the harmful activity in terms of relevant incentives and enabling conditions and, based on your explanation, propose plausible ways to curtail the problem. Such reform efforts might be proposed at diverse levels, including supranational rules and regimes, national rules, corporate policies, professional ethics, individual initiatives, or any combination thereof. The task is to identify who has the responsibility, the capacity and (potentially) the knowledge and motivation to change behavior toward effective curtailment. Special consideration will be given to papers that provide a detailed description of how change may come about in a particular geographical or sectoral context.

We welcome authors from diverse academic disciplines and from outside the academy. Please send your entry by email attachment on or before 31 August 2022 to Tom Cardamone at SenPrize@gfintegrity.org. While your message should identify you, your essay should be stripped of self-identifying references, formatted for blind review.

James Hansen: Climate, Energy, Development, Human Health, and Global Justice

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Dr. James Hansen, Director of the Climate Science, Awareness, and Solutions Program at Columbia University and former Director of the NASA Goddard Institute, speaks on climate change and global justice at the conference Justice in Development at Yale University. The conference was co-organized by Academics Stand Against Poverty, Global Financial Integrity, and the Yale Global Justice Program.

Rights & Justice 2015 Kicks Off at Yale

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Human Rights and Economic Justice: Essential Elements of the Post-MDG Agenda kicked off this Friday at Yale University. It is the fifth annual conference on illicit financial flows and financial transparency co-hosted by the Yale Global Justice Program and Global Financial Integrity. For the second year in a row, Academics Stand Against Poverty is serving a co-organizer, presenting panels on anti-poverty efforts led by academics.

Tom Cardamone, Managing Director of Global Financial Integrity, chaired the day, which had five sessions on the themes related to illicit financial flows: recent political developments; action by intergovernmental organizations to promote transparency; domestic policy perspectives; analysis of proposed policy solutions by scholars and journalists; and the potential of nonviolent resistance to combat illicit financial flows.

During the opening session, Raymond Baker, Director of Global Financial Integrity, canvassed recent commitments by the G20 and others to combat tax dodging and called on the audience to capitalize on growing political momentum while rejecting the incrementalist approach advocated by many governments. ASAP President Thomas Pogge explained how the existing supranational architecture, which permits of trade protectionism, arms trade, intellectual property law, and tax havens, generates inequality between people and countries and laid out proposed institutional reform goals that could be added to the post-MDG framework to reduce these harms.

Lena Diesing, Governance Advisor in the Global Partnerships and Policy Division at the OECD, and Gail Hurley, Policy Specialist in Development Finance at the UNDP, presented the work of their respective organizations to curb illicit financial flows. Ms. Diesing presented a report by the OECD on illicit financial flows, and Ms. Hurley spoke on the strengths and weaknesses of the post-MDG framework as a tool for promoting financial transparency.

Jose Cuisia, Jr., Ambassador of the Republic of the Philippines to the United States, Ebrahim Rasool, Ambassador of the Republic of South Africa to the United States, Jarmo Viinanen, Permanent Representative of the Republic of Finland to the United Nations, and Rafael Espada, Former Vice President of Guatemala each spoke on the ways in which illicit financial flows affect their respective countries and domestic efforts to fight the growth of these outflows.

According to Dr. Espada, working to alleviate poverty in Guatemala during his term as Vice President was extremely difficult, because it required solving four widespread problems: “corruption, tax evasion, money laundering, and violence”. However, he said that Guatemala had made significant progress on these fronts through legislative action. The Guatemalan government worked with the Construction Sector Transparency Initiative and NGOs like Global Financial Integrity and Transparency International. Espada said that while much work remains to be done, “at least now there are no anonymous associations and no more secrecy of banking”.

Zorka Milin, Yale Gruber Fellow at Global Witness, chaired the panel of academics and journalists, which featured Itai Grinberg, Associate Professor of Law at Georgetown Law School, Susan Rose-Ackerman, Henry R. Luce Professor of Jurisprudence at Yale University and Lee Sheppard, Contributing Editor at Tax Analysts’ Tax Notes.

The last two speakers, Peter Ackerman and Shaazka Beyerle of the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, stressed the power of nonviolent resistance to create greater democracy. Ackerman stressed the impressive track record of nonviolent movements: “In 50 of the 67 transitions from authoritarianism (75%) in the from 1972-2005, nonviolent civic resistance was a key factor” and “of the 50 transitions above, 32 (64%) have led to high levels of respect for political rights and civil liberties”. Following this argument, Shaazka Beyerle focused added that nonviolent civic resistance “disrupts activities, practices, dishonest relationships, and the overall status quo within systems of corruption and illicit financial flows”, strengthening the international mechanisms to implement legal administrative measures.

The conference agenda and program are available to download.

Yale Conference Update: Agenda Now Available

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Rights & Justice Post-2015: Call for Registration

Academics, NGO leaders, and policy makers from around the world will gather at Yale October 18-20 for the conference Human Rights and Economic Justice: Essential Elements of the Post-MDG Agenda. Speakers and conference participants will discuss policy solutions to urgent problems in international development, including global health disparities and illicit financial flows and will investigate new ways for academics to contribute to the fight against global poverty. We invite you to review our agenda and register. You can also download a printable version of this call for registration.

This event is the fifth in a series of annual conferences at Yale on financial transparency, all co-hosted by the Yale Global Justice Program and Global Financial Integrity. For the second year in a row, year Academics Stand Against Poverty has come on board as a co-organizer. The event will take place in Sudler Hall, 100 Wall Street, in the heart of Yale’s campus.

The conference is free and open to the public, and complimentary coffee and light lunch will be served. Luce Hall Auditorium is conveniently located near New Haven’s central business district and a 10-minute walk from spacious parking facilities. Information about travel and accommodation in New Haven is provided at the end of this page.

Schedule and Themes:

Conference sessions will run from 9 am to 5 pm on Friday, 9 am to 6 pm on Saturday, and 9 am to noon on Sunday.

Friday, October 18, the opening day of the conference, will be dedicated to illicit financial flows from the Global South — massive outflows of money resulting from tax avoidance and evasion, corruption, and organized crime. It is estimated that every year $1 trillion flows out of developing countries through illicit means, roughly ten times the amount that comes in as foreign assistance. Such losses seriously aggravate poverty and weaken public institutions. Recent commitments from the G8 and G20 to tackle tax dodging add new urgency to the search for policy solutions, and identifying a policy agenda for the Global South will be the focus of the day’s presentations. We are honored to host a group of distinguished policy makers and scholars from around the world as contributors to this important discussion. For a list of confirmed speakers, see the bottom of this document and accompanying agenda.

Saturday, October 19, will have a dual focus on global health and the role of academia in poverty alleviation. The morning session will feature speakers leading diverse initiatives to improve healthcare in the Global South, including a proposed global fund that would extend access to new medicines by rewarding pharmaceutical companies based on the health impact of their products and an organization using the energy from cell towers to refrigerate vaccines in remote areas.

Saturday’s second session will feature academics researching, advocating for, and implementing initiatives to alleviate poverty, and Sunday, October 20 will be wholly dedicated to the question of how academics can more effectively work together to improve the lives of people living in poverty. These panel discussions will be chaired by members of the International Board of Directors of Academics Stand Against Poverty, as a part of the Impact: Global Poverty project. Through Impact: Global Poverty, ASAP seeks to shed light on best practices from academic efforts at influencing poverty policy and civil-society efforts.

The conference will conclude on Sunday at noon. On Sunday afternoon, there will be a closed session for leaders of research centers focused on poverty and global justice, to discuss future collaboration.

Registration, Travel, and Accommodation:

Registration is free but necessary. To register, please e-mail Mariana Ramírez Herrera at ramirezh_mariana@hotmail.com.

If you need hotel accommodation in New Haven, consider reserving a room today, because local hotels tend to fill up early. We suggest the Omni Hotel, the New Haven Hotel, the Study, and the Courtyard Marriott. New Haven is served by the Greyhound bus company, MegaBus, MetroNorth, and Amtrak. The city has a small airport, called Tweed, which connects to a few regional airports. If you plan to come to New Haven by way of New York City airports or Hartford’s Bradley airport, you can reach New Haven by bus, train, or by using a shuttle service like GO Airport Shuttle or CT Limo. If you have questions about travel and lodging, contact Mariana Ramírez Herrera at ramirezh_mariana@hotmail.com.

Learn more about the Global Justice Program and Global Financial Integrity at their respective websites.

Conference Speakers:

Friday, October 18: Perspectives on Illicit Financial Flows Post-2015

  • Peter Ackerman, Founding Chair of the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict; Raymond Baker, Director of Global Financial Integrity
  • Jose Cuisia, Jr., Ambassador of the Philippines to the U.S.
  • Shaazka Beyerle, Senior Advisor of the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict
  • Lena Diesing, Governance Advisor in the Global Partnerships and Policy Division of the OECD
  • Pascale Dubois, Chief Suspension and Debarment Officer at the World Bank
  • Rafael Espada, Former Vice President of Guatemala
  • Itai Grinberg, Associate Professor of Law at Georgetown Law School
  • Gail Hurley, Policy Specialist in Development Finance at the UNDP
  • Thomas Pogge, Leitner Professor of Philosophy and International Affairs at Yale University
  • Ebrahim Rasool, Ambassador of South Africa to the U.S.
  • Susan Rose-Ackerman, Henry R. Luce Professor of Jurisprudence at Yale University
  • Lee Sheppard, Contributing Editor at Tax Analysts’ Tax Notes
  • Jarmo Viinanen, Ambassador and Permanent Representative of Finland to the UN

Saturday, October 19, Morning Session: Global Health

  • Julian Cockbain, Consultant European patent attorney
  • Steven Hoffman, Assistant Professor of Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics at McMaster University
  • Thomas Pogge, Leitner Professor of Philosophy and International Affairs at Yale University
  • Harvey Rubin, Director of the Institute for Strategic Threat Analysis and Response at the University of Pennsylvania
  • Sigrid Sterckx, Founding Member of the Bioethics Institute at the University of Ghent

Saturday, October 19, Afternoon Session: Impact: Global Poverty

  • Martha Chen, Lecturer in Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University
  • Teddy Cruz, Co-Director of the Blum Center for Cross-Border Poverty Research and Practice at the University of California-San Diego
  • Andries du Toit, Director of the Institute for Poverty, Land, and Agrarian Studies at the University of the Western Cape
  • Juliana Martinez-Franzoni, Member of the Scientific Committee of the Comparative Research Programme on Poverty
  • Nidhi Sadana Sabharwal, Director of the Indian Institute for Dalit Studies
  • Alberto Cimadamore, Scientific Director of the Comparative Research Programme on Poverty
  • Alberto Minujin, Director of Equity for Children at the New School
  • Jonathan Morduch, Managing Director of the Financial Access Initiative at New York University
  • David Hulme, Executive Director of the Brooks World Poverty Institute at the University of Manchester
  • Sukhadeo Thorat, Chairman of the Indian Council of Social Science Research

Sunday, October 20: Impact: Global Poverty, Continued

  • Fonna Forman, Co-Director of the Blum Center for Cross-Border Poverty Research and Practice at the University of California-San Diego
  • Tim Hayward, Director of the Just World Institute at the University of Edinburgh
  • Darrel Moellendorf, Chairman of Normative Orders Cluster of Excellence at Goethe University Frankfurt
  • Jill Coster van Voorhout, Researcher in the Rule of Law Program at The Hague Institute for Global Justice
  • Heather Widdows, Director of the Center for the Study of Global Ethics at the University of Birmingham
  • Thomas Pogge, Leitner Professor of Philosophy and International Affairs at Yale University

Poster photo: CC photo courtesy of Shreyans Bhansali via Flickr

Welcome to ASAP

Established in 2010, Academics Stand Against Poverty (ASAP) is an international community of academics confronting the rules and practices that perpetuate global poverty. Our evidence-based approach provides:

• alternatives to conventional analysis by media and governmental organizations,
• proposals for reforming national and supranational rules and policies,
• public education encouraging citizens to understand and engage with critical issues.

Academics Stand Against Poverty is registered as a 501(c)3 non-profit organization in the United States (EIN #32-0324998)

Our Board

Our board includes leading academics from a variety of fields, all with a passionate interest in poverty alleviation.
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Our Mission

We seek the elimination of global poverty, as guided by rigorous evidence-based and normative scholarship.
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We gladly accept all media inquiries, general inquiries, inquiries for national ASAP Chapters and other suggestions.
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