In recent years many countries in Oceania have developed tax havens. Using their sovereignty, Pacific Islands countries have profited by providing offshore havens from metropolitan taxation and regulation. Tax Havens and Sovereignty in the Pacific Islands surveys the timely, important and controversial topic of Pacific Islands tax havens - havens currently holding hundreds of billions of dollars.
In recent years many countries in Oceania have developed tax havens. Using their sovereignty, Pacific Islands countries have profited by providing offshore havens from metropolitan taxation and regulation. Tax Havens and Sovereignty in the Pacific Islands surveys the timely, important and controversial topic of Pacific Islands tax havens - havens currently holding hundreds of billions of dollars.
This collection of essays analyzes the special characteristics of the banking and financial sectors in islands and small states, and focuses on three main areas: the general financial environment; offshore financial centres; and banking and financial regulation. The main emphasis is on territories where banking and financial activity make a substantial contribution to gross domestic product.
Imagine a capitalist paradise. An island utopia governed solely by the rules of the market and inspired by the fictions of Ayn Rand and Robinson Crusoe. Sound far-fetched? It may not be. The past half century is littered with the remains of such experiments in what Raymond Craib calls “libertarian exit.” Often dismissed as little more than the dreams of crazy, rich Caucasians, exit strategies have been tried out from the southwest Pacific to the Caribbean, from the North Sea to the high seas, often with dire consequences for local inhabitants. Based on research in archives in the US, the UK, and Vanuatu, as well as in FBI files acquired through the Freedom of Information Act, Craib explores in careful detail the ideology and practice of libertarian exit and its place in the histories of contemporary capitalism, decolonization, empire, and oceans and islands. Adventure Capitalism is a global history that intersects with an array of figures: Fidel Castro and the Koch brothers, American segregationists and Melanesian socialists, Honolulu-based real estate speculators and British Special Branch spies, soldiers of fortune and English lords, Orange County engineers and Tongan navigators, CIA operatives and CBS news executives, and a new breed of techno-utopians and an old guard of Honduran coup leaders. This is not only a history of our time but, given the new iterations of privatized exit—seasteads, free private cities, and space colonization—it is also a history of our future.
This book analyzes shifting international taxation strategies in pursuit of tax nomads, individuals and companies who minimize their tax obligations among multiple countries. Focusing on the efforts of the United States, the collective endeavours of the European Union and the global initiative of the OECD under G20 guidance, it investigates their attempts to understand and control the mechanisms employed by such nomads. The author directs particular attention to intellectual property, used by multinational corporations to move income from high-tax to low-tax locations. Contrary to claims that globalization hinders tax collection, Vlcek argues that state sovereignty and state power remain the defining characteristic of international taxation. The EU and OECD in turn, he concludes, are leveraging cooperation with the US to force other countries to share taxpayer information with them. This significant work will interest economists, political scientists and tax experts. /div
Political disagreement is a fact of life. It can prompt people to stand for public office and agitate for political change. Others take a different route; they start their own nation. Micronations and the Search for Sovereignty is the first comprehensive examination of the phenomenon of people purporting to secede and create their own country. It analyses why micronations are not states for the purposes of international law, considers the factors that motivate individuals to separate and found their own nation, examines the legal justifications that they offer and explores the responses of recognised sovereign states. In doing so, this book develops a rich body of material through which to reflect on conventional understandings of statehood, sovereignty and legitimate authority. Authored in a lively and accessible style, Micronations and the Search for Sovereignty will be valuable reading for scholars and general audiences.
In Outlaw Paradise, the author argues that countries become tax havens as a conscious economic development strategy. These countries do not have the natural resources or the population to pursue more traditional economic development strategies, but they do have the ability to write and implement laws that create a virtual resource: banking secrecy. These countries are able to carry out this strategy because they tend to be well-governed, stable, and relatively wealthy, making them attractive partners for the international banking, legal, and accounting firms that drive offshore finance. The qualities tax havens possess also enable them to calculate that the benefits they reap from pursuing this strategy outweigh any penalties assessed by anti-tax haven international collective action activities, such as the naming and shaming campaigns of 2000 and 2009. The author argues that, while the tax havens seem to be complying with the campaigns from a juridical standpoint, actual financial behavior is unaffected. The author further argues that this outcome is predetermined given the nature of international regimes and the history of the concept of sovereignty, as well as tax haven relationships to both. Finally, Outlaw Paradise offers policy prescriptions and surveys recent developments resulting from the Panama Papers.
This book includes a selection of articles from the 2018 International Conference on Information Technology & Systems (ICITS 18), held on January 10 – 12, 2018, at the Universidad Estatal Península de Santa Elena, Libertad City, Ecuador. ICIST is a global forum for researchers and practitioners to present and discuss recent findings and innovations, current trends, lessons learned and the challenges of modern information technology and systems research, together with their technological development and applications. The main topics covered include information and knowledge management; organizational models and information systems; software and systems modeling; software systems, architectures, applications and tools; multimedia systems and applications; computer networks, mobility and pervasive systems; intelligent and decision support systems; big data analytics and applications; human–computer interaction; ethics, computers & security; health informatics; and information technologies in education.
'Non-traditional' security problems like pandemic diseases, climate change and terrorism now pervade the global agenda. Many argue that sovereign state-based governance is no longer adequate, demanding and constructing new approaches to manage border-spanning threats. Drawing on critical literature in political science, political geography and political economy, this is the first book that systematically explains the outcomes of these efforts. It shows that transboundary security challenges are primarily governed not through supranational organisations, but by transforming state apparatuses and integrating them into multilevel, regional or global regulatory governance networks. The socio-political contestation shaping this process determines the form, content and operation of transnational security governance regimes. Using three in-depth case studies - environmental degradation, pandemic disease, and transnational crime - this innovative book integrates global governance and international security studies, and identifies the political and normative implications of non-traditional security governance, providing insights for scholars and policymakers alike.
News headlines warn of rivalries and competing nations across Asia and the Pacific, even as powerful new cross-border relations form as never before. This book looks behind the Asia-Pacific curtain: at the new forms of social, economic, and political integration taking place through a global capitalism that is rife with contradictions, inequality, and crisis. We are moved beyond traditional conceptualizations of the inter-state system with its nation-state competition as the core organizing principle of world capitalism and the principal institutional framework that shapes the makeup of global social forces. These important studies examine and debate over how there is a growing transnationality of material (economic) relations in the global era, as well as an emerging transnationality of many social and class relations. How does transnational capitalist class fractions, new middle strata, and labor undergird globalization in Asia and Oceania? How have states and institutions become entwined with such processes? This book provides insight into a field of dynamic change.
