Economists say no country can sustain its economic development if it is not able to raise enough domestic revenue, mostly through taxes, to finance its development programmes. Simply put, it is just not sustainable for a government to rely on borrowing to deliver the essential social services that are key determinants of the human development of its people.

Yet, we are told that, in many developing countries, including Ghana, the poor bear the brunt of taxation while the big companies employ top notch lawyers and tax experts to help them avoid paying taxes; and the ill-gotten wealth is saved in off-shore financial centres (also known as tax havens) where little or no taxes are exacted on these funds.

This is corruption; and it's criminal. The current tendency of the World Bank, Transparency International, the OECD, and many others is to restrict their definitions of corruption to the bribery of public officials. But corruption involves much more than this. As a starting point we note that corruption always involves narrow interests abusing the common good. It always involves insiders using guarded information and operating with impunity. And it always corrodes institutions, worsens absolute poverty and inequality, and ultimately undermines faith in the rules and systems that are supposed to promote the public interest. Thus, a useful definition of corruption in the view of the Public Agenda would include the abuse of public interest and the undermining of public confidence in the integrity of rules, systems and institutions that are designed to promote the public interest.

There are many consequences of refining our definition of corruption. One is that tax evasion is identified as a form of corruption, which tends to be overlooked even though evaded taxes are stolen public assets too. Tax evasion involves abusive activity at the intersections between the public and the private sectors. It allows sections of society to bypass accepted norms, and provides one set of rules for rich and well-connected people, and another set for everyone else.

Furthermore, the proceeds of tax evasion use many of the same channels as other forms of corruption to move across borders: dummy corporations, shielded trusts, anonymous foundations, falsified pricing, fake documentations and so on, all supported by an army of bankers, lawyers and accountants.

The Tax Justice Network (TJN) has developed the Financial Secrecy Index (FSI) which complements the Corruption Perception Index (CPI) in describing the anatomy of global corruption. It is composed of an opacity score applied to 60 financial centres categorized as secrecy jurisdictions which encourage and enable illicit financial flows and tax evasion. The opacity scores are weighted according to the scale of operation of the selected secrecy jurisdictions, arriving at a ranking which places the United States as the top (that is, the jurisdiction whose secrecy has the greatest global impact), followed by Luxembourg, Switzerland, the Cayman Islands and the City of London. Clearly this new index tells a very different story about how corruption thrives within the globalised financial markets.

The Global Financial Integrity (GFI) has estimated that the cumulative stock of illicit financial flows from Africa amounted to US $865 billion between 1970 and 2008 and that the figure could be as high as US$1.8 trillion. Annual outflows from Africa have been estimated by GFI at US$30 billion, while Africa Union estimates US$148 billion.

This is why the Public Agenda believes it is time for those with the power to act to stem this brand of corruption to do so decisively. The G20 no doubt wields such power and so, the paper throws its full weight behind the call on the French president, Sarkozy who chairs the G20 to leverage his influence to keep tax firmly on the agenda of the November summit of the Group. We also call on all G20 countries to ensure that necessary measures are adopted, to stem the illicit flow of resources needed to provide health, education, water and sanitation for the world's poor.