draining development.pdf - Khazar University

360 Draining Development?investment positions, investment is reported in a total of 237 jurisdictions.There are relatively few developing countries among the reportingjurisdictions, but a good many smaller secrecy jurisdictions doreport. In contrast to the goods trade data, there is better direct coverageof links originating in secrecy jurisdictions, but less direct coverageof links originating in developing countries. No data set examinedoffers comprehensive coverage from both angles. As with the goodstrade data, the 2007 IMF Coordinated Portfolio Investment Surveywas coded to allow summary of the links by group.• Foreign direct investment. The United Nations Conference on Tradeand Development provides bilateral data on foreign direct investmentpositions, but at greater expense than was possible for this research. 21Future work should seek to obtain these data and assess their coverageand quality.• Claims on foreign banks. The Bank for International Settlements providesdata on the extent of foreign claims on banks of reporting jurisdictions.These data are available on a quarterly basis with a short lag.We use the December 2008 data, the most recent confirmed dataavailable when this chapter was presented (BIS 2008). Sadly, thesedata are available only on a bilateral basis for consolidated, ratherthan locational, statistics. This means that apparent links between adeveloping country and a particular secrecy jurisdiction must beinterpreted with caution, because, for example, Argentine deposits ina Bermudan bank operating out of Buenos Aires would be recordedas a Bermudan liability. Until locational statistics are made availableby the Bank for International Settlements, which would be a valuablecontribution to transparency, this is the only possibility; so, thisstrong caveat should be borne in mind.Main findingsAs noted elsewhere above, it would be preferable if we could judge jurisdictionsusing an indicator of secrecy on a sliding scale, thereby allowingus to measure gradual change where appropriate. For the moment, however,we make do with the range of existing lists. To present the resultssimply, we report trade shares for two groups: the larger group of secrecyjurisdictions identified by the Tax Justice Network (see table 11A.1 andthe note to table 9A.4) and a narrower group closer in composition to the