Born on October 30, 1935, Raymond W. Baker is an American businessman, scholar, author, and “authority on financial crime.” He is the founder and president of Global Financial Integrity, a research and advocacy organization in Washington, D.C., that works to reduce illicit financial flows.
Education
Baker graduated from Harvard Business School in 1960 and earned his degree from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1957, where he was a member of the ANAK Society.
Career
Raymond Baker began his professional career working as an entrepreneur in Nigeria in various roles for 15 years. By the mid-1970s, the Bakers found Nigeria no longer suitable for an expatriate family with young children, so they moved to the United States and settled in the Washington, D.C., area. Over the following 10 years, Raymond Baker conducted extensive business in Central and South America, other parts of Africa, Australia and New Zealand, Southeast Asia, and the People’s Republic of China. Then, in the late 1980s, he transitioned into providing commercial and financial advisory services to developing country governments. With this accumulation of experience, he joined the Brookings Institution in 1996 as a guest fellow in economic studies.
In 1996, Raymond Baker received a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation for a project titled “Flight Capital, Poverty, and the Free Market Economy.” The project took him to 23 countries where he interviewed over 335 bankers, politicians, government officials, economists, lawyers, tax collectors, security officers, and social scientists on the relationships among commercial tax evasion, bribery, money laundering, and economic growth.
In 2006, Baker founded Global Financial Integrity, the Washington, D.C.-based research and advocacy organization he continues to lead, with the aim of quantifying and analyzing illicit financial flows while formulating and promoting policy solutions to curb them. Under Baker’s leadership, GFI has published numerous economic reports estimating that nearly $1 trillion annually flows illicitly out of developing countries. What drives Baker’s passion for the issue is his core belief that these illegal capital outflows are the greatest economic challenge facing the world’s poor. Baker has been quoted saying: “This trillion dollars or more a year of illicit money flowing across borders and the structure that facilitates its movement is not only the largest loophole in the global economic system. It is also the most damaging economic condition affecting the poor in developing and transitional economies.”
In January 2009, Baker convened a coalition of research and advocacy organizations and over 50 governments to form the Task Force on Financial Integrity and Economic Development, an organization advocating for transparency in the global financial system. He served as the task force’s first director from its inception in 2009 until early 2013.
“Baker’s work explaining how $1 trillion in dirty money leaves poor countries every year has helped put financial transparency on the agenda of world leaders.” A recent focus of his work has been connecting illicit financial flows with human rights abuses and economic inequality.
Baker is also a member of the High-Level Panel on Illicit Financial Flows from Africa, established by the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa in February 2012. The panel is chaired by former South African President Thabo Mbeki. In addition, Baker is a member of the World Economic Forum’s Illicit Trade Council and has testified several times before U.S. House and Senate committees on money laundering, corruption, and illegal capital flight.
Published Works
In 2005, Baker published Capitalism’s Achilles Heel: Dirty Money and How to Renew the Free-Market System. This in-depth study of illicit capital flows, including a comprehensive exploration of its context and root causes, the financial impact on the global economy, and pathways for potential control and reduction, earned him international recognition as an authority on corruption, money laundering, economic growth, and foreign policy in relation to developing and transitional economies and their impact on Western economic and foreign interests.
A former guest fellow at the Brookings Institution and former senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, Baker is also the author of The Biggest Loophole in the Free-Market System, Illegal Flight Capital; Dangers to Global Stability, How Dirty Money Ties the Poor, and other works.