Over the past few decades, the foreign liabilities of the majority of countries in Sub-Saharan Africa have grown dramatically, propelling most nations into the status of Highly Indebted Poor Countries, when these liabilities reached unsustainable levels in the 1990s. At the same time, increases...

This paper presents estimates of capital flight from 25 low-income sub-Saharan African countries in the period 1970 to 1996. Capital flight totaled more than $193 billion (in 1996 dollars); with imputed interest earnings, the accumulated stock of flight capital amounts to $285 billion. The...