Available statistics from the existing studies have confirmed continuous and outward movement of financial resources (capital) from Africa to the rest of the world in a phenomenon known as capital flight, despite the outright lack or inadequacy of the resources in the continent. Also, while only one method (world bank residual) was mostly used for capital flight`s magnitude computation in the available previous studies, none of the methods adopted for the computation totally capture the complete essence of what capital flight stands for.. The need to fill these gaps is what motivates this study, which does not only used some of the available methods to estimate the magnitudes of capital flight individually but also combined them into various composites through the application of Principal Component Analysis (PCA). To achieve this, the trade data from different sources were employed for the computation of capital flight statistics for the 54 African countries over 1985 – 2020 periods.
The results obtained indicated that the magnitudes of capital flight were successfully computed with the three basic methods that have been used previously in the literature as well as the four possible combinations of the three basic methods with the aid of PCA. Furthermore, the findings revealed that there are variations in the values of mean of capital flight computed under the seven methods adopted, thereby underscoring the desirability of adopting the four PCA-derived methods of capital flight computation introduced by this study as well as the three methods previously used in the literature as valid means of capital flight estimation.