Can authorities curtail falsified trade & investment data that hide capital movements? Evidence from flows between BRICS and the USA

Usually developing and transitional countries are characterised by foreign exchange and capital scarcities and hence resort to stringent trade and capital control policies. This might become counterproductive and provide incentives to the international traders and investors to go for corrupt practices. This paper investigates how do these tight policies might encourage illegal or hidden capital movements across borders. By presenting both a theoretical and an empirical analysis, where traders and investors rationally misreport to evade stringent trade and investment barriers, we first show that illegal capital outflow takes place through trade misreporting and interestingly, export and import misreporting are cointegrated. Secondly and more importantly illegal capital inflow might take place through overreporting of FDI values and illegal capital outflow and inflow are cointegrated too. Based on the thorough investigation of the BRICS – USA bilateral trade and FDI data, we propose that a less regulated trade and investment regime might benefit these countries more as tight and restrictive policies seem to be self-defeating. Our study comes up with policy conclusions that might minimise the cross-border illegal capital movements.