Development Monitor provides online dashboards profiling major financial flows between the UK and individual developing countries—including trade, investment and aid.
These dashboards have revealed:
- Some low-income countries spent billions of pounds on UK services, such as management consulting, financial services and engineering. In several cases this amounted to 1-2% of their GDP, and often much greater than the UK aid they received.
- The Solomon Islands spent nearly 5% of GDP on UK services in 2017 —roughly half of its education budget.
- The African tax haven of Mauritius received vastly more UK investment per person than many low-income African countries —around 4,500 times more on a per-capita basis
Building the dashboards also highlighted significant gaps in official data on the UK’s interactions with developing countries, with information on potentially billions of pounds missing. Fixing these gaps would make it easier to scrutinise the UK’s overall impact and support more coherent policymaking.