To be integrated into the world economy, developing countries also need to pay special attention to the development of national trade-related financial service capacities. Lack of credit information systems and of knowledge related to modern trade finance products and institutions prevents these countries from adapting to the internationally accepted requirements of financial systems.
80% of global finance flows went to rich countries in 2000, with the entire African continent receiving less than 1% of direct foreign investment.
Financial capital, international financiers and their collaborating states operate on fundamentally undemocratic and anti-people terms. Their unregulated dynamics have a crushing impact on the people who, however, have absolutely no say on the matter. The IMF is the archetype of a bureaucratic, technocratic and anti-democratic structure.
The phenomenal surge in capital flows to developing countries in the past decade has fuelled the belief that the development financing needs of developing countries would be met by the more or less normal functioning of the market. However, the reality is that there is a high concentration of FDI flows in middle-income countries in South-East Asia and Latin America, while the low-income countries on the whole have been bypassed.