Automatic Exchange of Information as the New Global Standard: The End of (Offshore Tax Evasion) History?

Capital Taxation and International Cooperation

“…We find scattered evidence for their increasing relevance, suggesting that loopholes should be closed swiftly before they begin to undermine the regime (see e.g. Meinzer 2017).…”

Is Panama Really Your Tax Haven? Secrecy Jurisdictions and the Countries They Harm

“…To fill this gap, in this paper we quantify which secrecy jurisdictions harm individual countries the most and whether countries are successful in targeting these secrecy jurisdictions with their policies. We are defining harm as increasing the risk for illicit financial flows and for a further elaboration of the relationship between financial secrecy and illicit financial flows, we refer to existing literature (Cobham 2014;Janský, 2015; United Nations Economic Commission for Africa and African Union 2015; Cobham, Janský, and Meinzer 2015;Meinzer 2016). To that end, we develop the Bilateral Financial Secrecy Index (BFSI) on the basis of the Financial Secrecy Index (FSI) by Cobham, Janský, and Meinzer (2015).…”

“…Automatically exchanging tax information between pairs of countries under the Common Reporting Standard is a relatively novel international policy response to harmful financial secrecy. Often regarded as an innovative policy for addressing cross-border tax evasion, the de facto exclusion of developing countries and a lack of incentives for large uncooperative countries to participate, the United States in particular, remain some of the challenges for AIE itself (Meinzer 2017). Yet the network of bilateral exchange relationships (over 3700 as of 4 January 2018) keeps growing since 2016, including 80 countries at the time of this writing (OECD 2018).…”

“…For policy makers, our findings provide guidance as to which secrecy jurisdictions they should make it their priority to activate AIE relationships with. Similarly, we analyse the coverage of the European Union's recent blacklists to see whether they are neatly pointing to the tax havens of highest importance for the European Union as a whole, or if the blacklisting exercise is driven by other, most importantly political, motives (Knobel and Meinzer 2015;Meinzer 2016).…”

Policy diffusion within international organizations: A bottom-up analysis of International Monetary Fund tax work in Panama, Seychelles, and the Netherlands

“…At the time, the OECD promoted signing bilateral tax information exchange agreements that were based on exchange of information on request, in contrast with the OECD's newer automatic exchange of information also under a multilateral convention(Meinzer 2017).…”