Why are the Maltese so competitive?
bbc.com
bbc.com
It looks like a set of very bad habits. A place where signalling power and wealth is more important than self-growth.
Malta is a tax haven and famous for the assassination of the anti-corruption journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia.*
All that does not hint a healthy society, but a society that needs to get away from tribalism and embrace better ways.
There is nothing wrong with them having a beneficial tax system if it means people will relocate and spend money there while paying (some) tax.
What does a country like Malta, Cyprus or Monaco honestly have to lose by being a tax haven?
And Singapore is not as majority are Chinese/china culture
Simplisticly speaking, they only gain from being tax havens. Point is that everyone else looses. Taxing is a zero-sum situation where if you pay taxes in one place, you don't pay them somewhere else. So this is a nonsensical, because essentially the other countries' taxes are rendered optional. Why pay the whole thing, when you can do some corporate gymnastics and pay less to a tax haven?
It comes down to what in the socialist context is referred to as solidarity. In this case, if you want to tax something, everyone has to agree to that. If there are notable exceptions, it doesn't work. Malta is an example of a notable exception.
Especially the newer EU member states that have been experiencing an incredible amount of brain-drain i.e. people moving to bigger/"richer" countries. Bigger countries profit from that while smaller die out - unless they make themselves more attractive somehow. To some extent its happening within bigger countries as well with urbanisation - in Germany for example villages that are not close to bigger urban centres have the same problem.
Whether you call it a "tax haven" or subsidising - in practice its virtually the same thing. Of course you need some rules in place to prevent creative tax practices by multinationals (like linking taxation to physical presence) - but its a do or die sort of thing.
I'm not really sure if "anti-corruption journalist" accurately describes her work:
https://daphnecaruanagalizia.com/2016/09/hot-new-style-wroug...
https://daphnecaruanagalizia.com/2015/09/bottom-of-the-barre...
https://daphnecaruanagalizia.com/2013/08/oh-look-whos-here-m...
I'm assuming he meant that that is not the writing you'd expect from a so called "anti corruption" journalist.
This reads like articles from a high school newspaper, not investigative journalism into corruption.
TMZ has probably broken a corruption related story in the past, would you call them “anti-corruption” journalists?
[0] https://calvinayre.com/2017/11/22/business/malta-gambling-bi...
I presume if you want to accept German players u need to conform to German rules. So how do these online casinos operate inside the EU ?
EDIT: also note that Malta population is 500K. So even one large unicorn can shift the economy numbers.
The Maltese economy is full of money laundering, tax evasion [1, 2], mafia [3], and other gray areas [4, 5] anyway. This article is a puff piece in the travel section, so it's hardly the place for mentioning of the Panama papers or journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia that was investigating online gambling and corruption was killed by a car bomb in 2017 [6].
[0] https://ec.europa.eu/growth/sectors/gambling_en
[1] http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/dodgy-gaming-bu...
[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-40026826
[3] https://www.occrp.org/en/thedaphneproject/how-maltese-online...
[4] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/oct/16/tax-evasion...
[5] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-09-11/why-the-e...