Offshore finance in Ghana: why not?

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Notes

It should be noted that this warning statement was not to be found on the OECD's website, which includes a section dedicated to ‘harmful tax practices’ along with its associated Global Forum on Transparency and Exchange of Information for Tax Purposes. And the OECD document linked to by the online version of the newspaper article also fails to mention Ghana; see: www.oecd.org. All public (Internet) references to the OECD statement on the Ghanaian OFC reference the Guardian article.

NB: the table in Palan et. al. (2010) aggregates the lists from eleven sources dating back to 1977, including OECD (2000) and Zoromé (2007).

See: http://www.barclays.com/africa/ghana/barclays_in.htm.

Readers interested in a more academically rigorous analysis on capital flight out of Africa are referred to Ndikumana and Boyce (2003) and Ndikumana and Boyce (2008); and for an analysis of the difficulties involved in estimating capital flight in developing economies see Epstein (2005).

The term ‘secrecy jurisdiction’ was adopted by the Tax Justice Network in 2008 in order to elide the debate surrounding the usage of tax haven versus offshore financial centre, see: www.secrecyjurisdictions.com.