The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency may be incompetent in many of its assigned duties, (such as tracking the 9-11 terrorists before they attacked), but it is a good bureacracy when it comes to compiling statistics.
Periodically the CIA ranks 229 nations and territories worldwide based on what each one earns as per capita gross domestic product (GDP), meaning the average income of the people who live there.
Examine the CIA country list and you will find that tax havens dominate the top of the rankings. A majority of the top 20 jurisdictions are tax havens, based on the definition published in 2000 by the experts at the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Luxembourg, Bermuda, and the island of Jersey, (the one in the Channel Islands), lead the list, while places such as the Cayman Islands, Andorra, Hong Kong, and Switzerland also rank among the world's wealthiest and most prosperous jurisdictions.
In an ideal world, other nations would emulate the tax and economic opolicies of these so-called "tax havens" in an effiort to raise the standard of living of their citizens and attract foreign investment captial.
Instead, the high-tax, welfare state countries of the EU and the OECD persecute these tax havens as part of an effort to create an international high tax cartel for big spending politicians. They certainly don't let the facts hamper their illogical crusade against global propserity.
For the full CIA country list, which makes for interesting reading, go to
LINK: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2004rank.html
If you want to know more about what the world's tax havens has to offer you, click here for information about the new edition of my book, Where to Stash Your Cash: Tax Havens of the World.
LINK: http://web-purchases.com/190STHOW/W190H723/
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