Modern civilization revolves around money. However, money is a paradox. It is nothing more than a representation of and medium for decentralized networks of social trust, but its production is controlled by highly centralized networks of firms, places, and governments, and there is never enough...

Corporate tax avoidance hampers domestic revenue mobilization and, with it, the development of lower- and middle-income countries. While a wide range of studies has shed light on the magnitude of profit shifting by multinational corporations, the indirect costs of this behaviour is...

Questions have been raised regarding the role of low-tax offshore jurisdictions in the global financial crisis, based largely on evidence that many problematic asset-backed securities were issued from or listed in the Cayman Islands, Jersey, Ireland, and other ‘offshore' sites. However, there...

Although sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) are invariably profit-seeking in orientation, a large proportion pursue a “double bottom line” wherein investments are simultaneously used to advance so-called “strategic” national developmental objectives. This paper seeks to dissect the potential...

Here we present a novel analysis of the development of offshore banking since 1980, which addresses important but still - unanswered questions about the both the role of offshore centers in the global financial crisis, and the post-crisis stability of these centers. We show that post-1980...

While FDI is generally assumed to represent long-term investments within the “real” economy, approximately 30-50% of global FDI is accounted for by networks of offshore shell companies created by corporations and wealthy individuals for tax and other purposes. To date, there has been limited...

Economic geographers have long defined themselves in opposition to the abstract theoretical universe of economics, rather emphasizing the specificity of economic activities in the “real world.” To a large extent, this emphasis also characterizes the subfield of financial geography, which has...

Sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) have grown rapidly in recent years in both value and number. Despite a great deal of popular debate, very little scholarly attention has centered on the ‘strategic use' of SWFs by states, i.e., as tools to promote national development. Using a ‘network mapping'...

Lying at the heart of offshore finance is a basic contradiction. On the one hand, offshore finance is fundamentally driven by the desire to protect private property from the state; on the other hand, this property is itself ultimately dependent on the protection of the state. This dilemma has...