The World of International Financial Centres: Opportunities, Concerns, and Regulations (eBook)

The World of International Financial Centres is a pivotal book elucidating that although evidence reveals that tax havens are responsible for an astounding multi-trillion-dollar loss of tax revenues worldwide, offshore financial centres (OFCs) represent only the ‘low-hanging fruit’ of colossal angst spreading to every corner of today’s global financial services landscape with the New York–London axis at its root. This significant book furnishes insights into the persistence of OFCs despite tightening of the rules regarding tax and financial transparency, and its insistence that the blameworthiness of large-scale tax avoidance should be assessed as a global tax problem requiring a coordinated and collaborative response from both developing and advanced economies.

The author provides a biting critique and analysis of the tax and regulatory environments that the OFCs operate from illustrating that tax havens or OFC features exist in almost every jurisdiction as a virtually inevitable outcome of the transformation of economies worldwide over the past three decades, as nations and economic blocs compete for foreign investments, and as nations seek expansion of markets to accelerate growth. The following aspects of this phenomenon are covered:

• the financialization process in global transactions
• erosion of credibility in political establishments with regard to their ability to govern from the centre
• ultralight regulatory enclaves found in parts of developed countries
• public pressure demanding enhanced international cooperation and global tax reforms, now increasingly led by the US Biden administration, and increasingly likely to reach consensus among G7 economies, and momentum generated for reform of financial reporting systems by the leaked Panama and Paradise Papers, as well as the gathering impact of the COVID-19 pandemic that led to growing government involvements in national and regional economies to protect the health and economic welfares of their respective populations