Giant_and_Dwarf-FIN

Giant and Dwarfin April 1979 134 and Idi Amin’s escape into exile in Saudi Arabia. At the start of the 1990s,Idi Amin had been out of Uganda for more than a decade, but a majority of potential investorsstill thought he was in power.The free flow of capital has not brought inflows of capital to the countries of the bottombillion; just the opposite, it has increased outflows. The loss of capital from African countriesis frequently hidden and illegal, which makes it so difficult to map. Economic analysisleads Collier to the conclusion that Nigerians alone at the end of the Nigerian militarydictatorship in 1998 had around $100 billion in foreign accounts! For an African countrythis is a massive amount: simply compare it to the state budget expenditure of Slovakia orthe Czech Republic, which were planned at around $22 billion and $62 billion respectivelyin 2011. Other calculations led Collier’s team to conclude that Africans held 38 % of theirprivate wealth abroad in 1990. Africa, more than any other part of the world, is losing thecapital it so desperately needs. Africans themselves are certain that this massive outflowof capital is the result of corruption. Whether this wealth was obtained through corruptpractices or honestly, the capital is leaving Africa because the conditions for its investmenton the continent are simply horrendous. Foreign investors aren’t the only ones who don’ttrust African countries and institutions, Africans themselves don’t believe in them. 135The movement of people, the third key aspect of globalization, enables this flow ofcapital out of Africa. Migration from impoverished countries to wealthier countries is a controversialsubject: some support it, others decry it. On the positive side, such migrationleads to an increase in remittances, or the money that migrants send back home. One ofthe best flows of remittances that has been mapped is between the USA and Mexico anda few other Latin American countries; significant flows also include California to India, fromthe countries of the Persian Gulf to eastern and western Asia and parts of Africa and fromWestern Europe to Eastern Europe, the Balkans, North Africa and elsewhere. This moneyoften helps individual families and entire communities keep their heads above water: goodexamples of countries that survive thanks to remittances are Somalia and the much closerMoldavia and Kosovo. The problem of remittances is their long-term stability: research hasshown that the second generation of migrants sends much less money back to their countryof origin; as the personal relationship fade out, so to do the cash flows.134 The Uganda-Tanzania War, which remains a relatively forgotten period of history, led to the end of oneof the bloodiest dictatorships of the second half of the 20 th century as marked in towns and cities acrossTanzania with memorials to its victims. It is estimated that around 1,000 Tanzanians, 1,500 Ugandansand 500 Libyans, who were sent to aid Idi Amin by Libyan dictator Muammar Kaddafi, were killed inthe war. The loss of lives among soldiers places the war among the smaller conflicts in Africa but warexpenditure was a major and long-term drain on the economy of Tanzania.135 The loss of capital is also not restricted to African countries: during 2011 and 2012 huge volumes of depositswere withdrawn from Greek, Italian and Spanish banks and moved to Germany, Switzerland anda number of other countries. For example see: http://eurokriza.sk/2012/03/z-talianska-a-spanielskautekaju-vklady/.150