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Both academic research and public policy debate around tax havens and offshore finance typically suffer from a lack of definitional consistency. Unsurprisingly then, there is little agreement about which jurisdictions ought to be considered as tax havens—or which policy measures would result in their not being so considered. In this article we explore and make operational an alternative concept, that of a secrecy jurisdiction and present the findings of the resulting Financial Secrecy Index (FSI). The FSI ranks countries and jurisdictions according to their contribution to opacity in global financial flows, revealing a quite different geography of financial secrecy from the image of small island tax havens that may still dominate popular perceptions and some of the literature on offshore finance. Some major (secrecy‐supplying) economies now come into focus. Instead of a binary division between tax havens and others, the results show a secrecy spectrum, on which all jurisdictions can be situated, and that adjustment for the scale of business is necessary in order to compare impact propensity. This approach has the potential to support more precise and granular research findings and policy recommendations.

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As the complexity of transnational corporations (TNCs) grew in the post-war period, their effective degree of disclosure diverged from what is standardly expected of single-country firms. Country-by-country reporting is the key proposal to reestablish appropriate TNC disclosure, and ultimately TNC accountability -and as such, has been consistently resisted by many TNCs, professional services firms and some key headquarters countries in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. This paper charts two main waves of pressure for progress. The first, most visible from the late 1960s to the early 1980s, reflects the claims of the New International Economic Order and the rise of the G77 group of countries, while the second saw international civil society take a leading role. The current phase sees these two impulses combine and may finally deliver meaningful progress. The paper addresses both the political underpinnings and the developing technical component to the claims for deeper TNC disclosure, ultimately shaped into the pursuit of an international standard for public, country-by-country reporting -and the resistance to it. The paper also provides illustrative results based on the existing country-by-country reporting data for banks. It concludes with a discussion of the prospects for country-by-country reporting.