draining development.pdf - Khazar University

Tax Havens and Illicit Flows 3593. 19 Limitations include the absence of certain reporting jurisdictionsof interest, for example, Channel Islands, which are counted with theUnited Kingdom for overseas trade purposes. This data set consists ofsome 580,000 observations dealing with total trade only (that is, nocommodity breakdown below the SITC 3 total). Future work couldexpand this data set by combining totals reported on different SITCsand other bases and, eventually, by exploring patterns in particularcommodity codes (for example, natural resource codes).By coding each reporter and partner country individually andaccording to groups (for example, regions, income groups, or varioussecrecy jurisdiction lists), one may obtain values for the share oftrade carried by each country with members of other groups. Topresent the data, we have partially aggregated the jurisdictions intogroups by income level and region, according to World Bank classifications.The key information is the share of trade carried out withsecrecy jurisdictions.• Trade in services. The United Nations also provides bilateral data onservices trade, but this database is relatively recent and currently hasmuch weaker coverage. We do not use it here, in part because of theespecially weak coverage of bilateral reporting by developing countries.Future work should investigate in more detail the availabilityand value of these data, possibly with a view to encouraging reporting.• Portfolio investment. The IMF Coordinated Portfolio Investment Surveyreports stocks of the following categories of portfolio investmentson an annual basis: equity securities (for example, shares, stocks, participations,and similar documents such as American depositaryreceipts, where these denote the ownership of equity), long-term debtsecurities (for example, bonds, debentures, and notes, where thesegenerally give unconditional rights to a fixed future income on a givendate and have an original maturity greater than a year), and shorttermdebt securities (for example, treasury bills, commercial paper,and banker acceptances, with an original maturity of less than a year). 20For 2007, 74 jurisdictions reported; these were the most recent dataavailable when this chapter was presented, and we use them here.Data are provided on the assets and liabilities of jurisdictions, butbased only on reporting from the creditor side. Because each reportertherefore provides data for all other jurisdictions in which they have