There is general consensus that tax havens have long played a major role in the evolution of the capitalist system on a global scale. There is also no doubt that Switzerland is one of the first, if not the first, tax haven to have emerged, as well as one of the most important in the world. However, knowledge and understanding of the history, particularly the distant past, of tax havens remains lacking, despite the considerable volume of literature devoted to them. Therefore, this article attempts to make two innovative contributions. The first is an attempt to explain the emergence of the Swiss tax haven, by analyzing the processes and factors whose intertwining led to its emergence. It thus improves the general understanding of the genesis of tax havens at an international level. The second contribution is to show that already on the eve of World War I, the Swiss Confederation possessed the necessary characteristics for a tax haven.

We assess the European Union’s (EU) most significant international tax policy. The 2005 Tax and Savings Directive obliges cooperating jurisdictions to withhold tax or report on interest income earned by entities whose beneficial owner is an EU resident. As the Directive applies only to beneficial ownership in cooperative jurisdictions, it can be circumvented by transferring ownership to a non-EU resident or company or by transferring the entity to a non-cooperative jurisdiction. Using a database on individual offshore entities leaked from two firms in 2013, we compare the response of EU-owned entities with a control group of non-EU-owned entities. We show that the growth of EU-owned entities declined immediately after the Directive’s implementation, whereas that of non-EU-owned entities remained stable. We observe the substitution of EU ownership for non-EU ownership, as well as the substitution of cooperative for non-cooperative offshore jurisdictions. This calls for anti-evasion policies that are broader in scope and scale.

The growth of Chinese multinational enterprises (MNE) has stimulated great interest in their outward foreign direct investment (FDI) strategies, particularly among academics in business and management studies. To date, however, serious methodological shortcomings plague empirical studies in these disciplines. Specifically, the vital issue of how Chinese MNEs use and route FDI via tax havens and offshore financial centres is not adequately dealt with. These practices have created large geographical, industrial composition and volume biases in Chinese outward FDI data. Using a sample of 100 Chinese MNEs, we illustrate how the use of tax havens and offshore financial centres has created these biases, and examine the implications for understanding Chinese MNE activity.

This article discusses the Review to Identify Non-Cooperative Countries or Territories, which was issued by the Financial Action Task Force in June 2000. After a general overview of the problem of secrecy havens and of the criteria used to identify them, the article gives a critical assessment of the process used to arrive at the ‘black list’ of 15 jurisdictions that was eventually drawn up. In this respect, a comparison is made with the work carried out by the OECD in the field of unfair tax competition by tax havens. It also looks forward at the possible follow-up to this list, both by the FATF and other international fora.