I wonder if corruption is to some degree inevitable in any country this small. How do you deal with international companies and billionaires who are richer than your entire nation?
https://icelandmonitor.mbl.is/news/politics_and_society/2016...
"amongst the least corrupt" != "free of corruption"
It's like saying X is among the best schools in the region and sends the most children to university and someone rebutting the statement with "yeah, but billy went there and didn't graduate and didn't go to university."
It's as if their brain is a computer program that's designed to purposely misinterpret information and then argue against the information for the sake of it.
Sorry for the rant. This type of nonsense has been building, or least becoming more obvious, lately in the public and political spheres and I needed to flag it for my sanity.
If you can attract a significant slice of the world's wealth and somehow funnel just 1% into the local economy, that can be enough to provide generous services for a 6-digit population. But it obviously doesn't work for anything larger. My example of Ireland, above, is probably just on the threshold. And the model only worked for them because they also have a well-educated and english-speaking population, making it attractive for actual operations to be located in Dublin.
The problem is, obviously, that this is an international zero-sum game. The US, Russia, and most EU countries provide all the infrastructure that allowed their citizen to earn the money, but the money leaves those countries as soon as the tax-man rings.
Which is why the last decade has seen an assault on tax havens: Switzerland's bank secrecy laws have already been neutered, Panama has lost most trust with the recent leaks, and Ireland is forced to play nice by the EU.
It's highly likely that oligarchs will soon run out of such locales, because it's becoming increasingly difficult to maintain both ingredients necessary for a tax haven: you need not only low taxation, but also robust rule-of-law. Those two goals come into conflict once the first is used to brand you an international pariah.
This is a pretty baseless assumption. Most of the wealth is obviously produced in large countries with very significant natural and human resources, but we have no way to know if they would be producing more or less wealth if their tax burdens and governments were smaller.
What evidence that exists suggests government significantly smaller than the norm in the developed world is better for economic development.
If it is indeed the case that low taxes contribute to more global economic growth, then these tax havens are bolstering the world's economy rather than exploiting it in a zero sum way.
>>Those two goals come into conflict once the first is used to brand you an international pariah.
By the sounds of it, there is a concerted push by a large and powerful political faction to make it illegal for any country in the world to have low taxes, on the basis that a country exercising its sovereignty in this way is somehow victimizing and exploiting other countries.
But they are just getting started moving into bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, in the nick of time
I think drawing correlations between country size/population/gdp/wealth and corruption is going to be difficult. However, arguably, looking at smaller countries we should see this trend at a similar rate. I'd suggest comparing with extremes: two, much smaller European countries.
- Andorra; pop: ~90k, GDP per capita (2016, est.) ~36k USD
- San Marino; pop: ~35k, GDP per capita (2017, est.) ~45k USD
I spent a while looking in to them, but then started thinking "how do you measure corruption"? I came across a 'corruption perception index (2017)'[1], which aggregates different measures of corruption across various sources, but sadly they have no data for either countries. Comparing them with neighbouring countries however, would put them right in the ball park of Malta.
[1] https://www.transparency.org/news/feature/corruption_percept...
Ireland is corrupt like this - not for major crimes, just lots of little things, like planning permission and speeding points on driving licenses.
Nobody wants to make a big stink because everybody swims in the same small pond, and what goes around comes around.
Here's a case study on the topic of speeding points: https://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2013/oct/03/iri... ; speeding points corruption is an ongoing political issue that has brought down multiple justice ministers, primarily due to the attempted coverups (trying to silence Maurice McCabe).