I think you know my answer to that, but I wasn't asking. Reuters were. As they put it:
Tax havens have been blamed (and lauded in some quarters) for many things. But a new book that is causing quite a stir says they are a key reason behind African poverty and underdevelopment.
“Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men who Stole the World” by Nicholas Shaxson argues among other things that they are “deep drains of development.”
“Poverty in Africa cannot be understood without understanding the role of offshore. The world's worst war for years has been the civil conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is tied in with the wholesale looting of its mineral resources via tax havens,” he writes.
As they add:
The broad brush – and this is a simplication of the overall argument – is that tax havens enable the flight of scarce capital from Africa to other regions, stunting the continent's ability to develop on a range of fronts. Such havens inclue not only tropical destinations like the Cayman Islands but the City of London and the U.S. state of Delaware.
And global efforts to curtail them, a subject we have written on before, have been largely ineffective. Resource-rich countries are also, for a range of reasons, more prone to capital outflows to tax havens and other offshore institutions. And Africa is rich in resources.
Shaxson's work is in many ways a counter-argument to the “aid is bad” consensus that is taking hold in some quarters.
A counter-argument that has been sorely needed.
Warmly endorsed and now published in USA too.
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Well, technically it’s published this Tuesday, 12 April in the USA. But, yes, for those of you in the USA who want to find out more about the book, you can attend an event with Nick Shaxson on Thursday, 14 April in Washington, DC at the Open Society Institute.
More information available here.
Just when America is waking up to tax havens, San Francisco goes and does this:
http://youtu.be/3aGtXLdLLys
the shame of poverty has a beginning and an end. the end, as this blog points out, is the opaque tax havens which black hole funds. the beginning is, in large part, gullible western countries and organisations fire-hosing hard-earned taxpayer funds.
garbage in, garbage out
Everyday the evidence AGAINST “Tax Havens” continues to mount…
Level playing field for all in country-by-country reporting and an international boycott of corrupt “secrecy jurisdictions”. Starting near to home with Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man.