The Financial Secrecy Index: Shedding New Light on the Geography of Secrecy - Working Paper 404

Alex Cobham
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Alex Cobham, Petr Janský and Markus Meinzer

No 404, Working Papers from Center for Global Development

Abstract: Both academic research and public policy debate around tax havens and offshore finance typically suffer from a lack of definitional consistency. Unsurprisingly then, there is little agreement about which jurisdictions ought to be considered as tax havens—or which policy measures would result in their not being so considered. In this article we explore and make operational an alternative concept, that of a secrecy jurisdiction and present the findings of the resulting Financial Secrecy Index (FSI). The FSI ranks countries and jurisdictions according to their contribution to opacity in global financial flows, revealing a quite different geography of financial secrecy from the image of small island tax havens that may still dominate popular perceptions and some of the literature on offshore finance. Some major (secrecy-supplying) economies now come into focus. Instead of a binary division between tax havens and others, the results show a secrecy spectrum, on which all jurisdictions can be situated, and that adjustment lfor the scale of business is necessary in order to compare impact propensity. This approach has the potential to support more precise and granular research findings and policy recommendations.

Keywords: tax havens; illicit financial flows (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F36 F65 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 28 pages
Date: 2015-05
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (35)

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