[go: up one dir, main page]
IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/fau/wpaper/wp2019_41.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Progress of Global Financial Transparency: Evidence from The Financial Secrecy Index 2009-2018

Author

Listed:
  • Petr Jansky

    (Institute of Economic Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University, Opletalova 26, 110 00, Prague, Czech Republic)

  • Miroslav Palansky

    (Institute of Economic Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University, Opletalova 26, 110 00, Prague, Czech Republic)

Abstract
While financial secrecy has recently risen on the agenda of policy makers and scholars alike, much remains unknown about its development since the global financial crisis. To show how financial secrecy evolved over time on average, by category, and across countries, we combine the five Financial Secrecy Index editions from 2009 to 2018 to create a financial secrecy panel data set. We present four main findings. First, financial secrecy has decreased on average - i.e. that financial transparency has improved - by at least 2-9% between 2011 and 2018. Second, most of the observed improvement comes from international standards and cooperation, one of four key financial secrecy areas recognized by the Financial Secrecy Index. Third, we observe a convergence across countries between 2011 and 2018 - many of the most secretive have become less so while the opposite is true of some formerly less secretive countries. For example, the Seychelles are now only slightly more secretive than the Netherlands. Fourth, we find that changes in contributions to global financial secrecy over time are not tied to geographical regions and that it is thus worth studying changes at the individual country-level. For example, we find that the United Arab Emirates, the Netherlands and Malta have become substantially more important providers of financial secrecy, though they are still less important than the current leaders, i.e. Switzerland, the United States and the Cayman Islands. Having documented changes in financial secrecy over the past decade, we conclude with how the data set may be used as a tool for studying and perhaps even curbing financial secrecy - a policy objective which has thus far been only moderately met.

Suggested Citation

  • Petr Jansky & Miroslav Palansky, 2019. "The Progress of Global Financial Transparency: Evidence from The Financial Secrecy Index 2009-2018," Working Papers IES 2019/41, Charles University Prague, Faculty of Social Sciences, Institute of Economic Studies, revised Dec 2019.
    • Handle: RePEc:fau:wpaper:wp2019_41
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://ies.fsv.cuni.cz/en/veda-vyzkum/working-papers/6201
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Offshore finance; financial transparency; financial secrecy; secrecy jurisdictions; tax havens;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • F36 - International Economics - - International Finance - - - Financial Aspects of Economic Integration
    • F65 - International Economics - - Economic Impacts of Globalization - - - Finance
    • G28 - Financial Economics - - Financial Institutions and Services - - - Government Policy and Regulation
    • H26 - Public Economics - - Taxation, Subsidies, and Revenue - - - Tax Evasion and Avoidance
    • H87 - Public Economics - - Miscellaneous Issues - - - International Fiscal Issues; International Public Goods

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:fau:wpaper:wp2019_41. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Natalie Svarcova (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/icunicz.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.