Benford's law states that in many data sets the overall distribution of the significant digits tends to be logarithmic so that the occurrence of numbers beginning with smaller first significant digits is more often than those with larger ones. We investigate here recent data on illicit financial flows from developing countries and reveal that the data does submit to Benford's law. Further, the general improvement in the statistical accuracy which we observed supports the applicability of the normalization process used to limit the inclusion of the countries in the database for which the illicit financial flows are not substantial.
Benford's law states that in many data sets the overall distribution of the significant digits tends to be logarithmic so that the numbers beginning with smaller significant digits occur more often than those with larger ones. We investigate here recent data on illicit financial flows from developing countries and reveal that the data does submit to Benford's law. Further, the general improvement in the statistical accuracy we find here supports the applicability of the two stage normalization in filtering out countries from database for which illicit financial flows are not substantial.
D
occurrence of
R
first significant digits is
significant digits occur
R
which we observed
we find here
R
normalization process used to limit the inclusion of the countries in the
two stage normalization in filtering out countries from
D
the