TJN this morning publishes a short new book entitled The Finance Curse: how oversized financial centres attack democracy and corrupt economies.
The book, co-authored by TJN's Director John Christensen and Nicholas Shaxson, is available for free here, in pdf format. It is also available on the Kindle e-reader, for a nominal fee.
This book emerges from our long-running work on tax havens, and differs from much of the work that we've done in the past. Our work on tax havens has generally focused on the global impact of tax havens or secrecy jurisdictions: that is, the impact that one haven has on the citizens of other countries, elsewhere. The Finance Curse, by contrast, looks at the domestic impacts of hosting an oversized financial centre. We find that finance is beneficial to an economy up to a point, but once it grows too large a range of harms start to emerge. Much of the damage, and the underlying processes at work, are similar to those found with a Resource Curse that afflicts many countries that are overly dependent on natural resources.
The graph here (click to enlarge it) provides a taster illustrating just one of many aspects of the issue.
There's more on The Finance Curse here.
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Just a note: if you don’t want to pay Amazon’s Kindle store tax, you can generate a .mobi file using any number of free tools. The Amazon .azc file format is just .mobi with DRM attached.
Kindle users can just copy the PDF onto their device, connecting to a PC with a USB cable (the built-in browser won’t download PDFs, annoyingly), but PDFs formatted for reading on a PC screen, or printing, display in tiny print on the Kindle screen. It tries to show the whole original page, rather than reflowing the text to be visible. The proper eBook formats are reflowed.
I don’t understand what we’re supposed to take from chart. By combining two unrelated figures it’s produced something quite meaningless. Neighbouring countries at either end of the spectrum: Trinidad and UAE; Jamaica and Ireland – clearly have nothing in common.
Go and read it
Not the best recommendation for the book, with half the top 6 six countries being notorious for the level of emigration and Albania coming 31 places ahead of poster-boy Sweden. I might still read the book but anyone who starts off by telling me that it is worse to live in Kuwait than Saudi or the Bahamas than Belarus is shooting their foot off then plunging the ankle into putresecence.
If you rad the book you may understand what you’re talking about
No thanks, I don’t want to support a tax-avoiding company like Amazon.
There’s a free PDF
The chart looks like the fruit of time wasted on spurious relationships.
The fact that the authors have wasted their time is not an argument for me to waste mine.
Candidly, that’s a massive exaggeration
Struggling to understand in what way it is better to live in Ukraine than Switzerland….
If you have used some method to reach that conclusion, your method is junk. In my industry we call this a “sanity check”. You start with facts you already know, and compare the results of your method.
In this case it is obvious to a child of ten that it is better to live in Switzerland than the Ukraine. If your method concludes that it is better to live in Ukraine than Switzerland, your method has failed the sanity check: Something has gone wrong and you need to fix it.
Go read h book
And no one is saying they’re better
You are creating an entirely false straw man
For Pete’s sake, can’t you even accept a post that points out that you’ve mistyped or even correct your typo?
When correcting the typo you could even change “rad” to read, which makes you look careless. And your reply looks silly except to idiots.
So your best move is to correct your typo in line with my previous post and pretend that I didn’t have to point it out.
Very politely, what are you talking about?
If you honestly think I bother about typos then you’re very mistaken
The problem is that the chart, intuitively, doesn’t seem to demonstrate the adverse domestic effects of an oversize financial centre as the measurements seem to give anomalous results. So it’s not much of a shop window for the book, no matter how good or well researched it is.
I think that’s a fair point and it has been noted