The Economist has an entire section on the “offshore” world in the latest issue. Among the key findings are that so-called offshore financial centers promote growth and discourage wasteful government:

…the most vexing problem that highly mobile financial flows pose for governments is that when they cross borders they may take tax revenues with them. …As companies become ever more multinational, they find it easier to shift their activities and profits across borders and into OFCs. …Financial liberalisation—the elimination of capital controls and the like—has made all of this easier. So has the internet, which allows money to be shifted around the world quickly, cheaply and anonymously. …tax, regulatory and other competition is healthy because it keeps bigger countries’ governments from getting bloated. Others argue that OFCs may be an inevitable concomitant of globalisation. “Even if today’s OFCs were somehow stamped out, something like them would pop up to take their place,” says Mihir Desai of Harvard Business School. Some academics have found signs that OFCs have unplanned positive effects, spurring growth and competitiveness in nearby onshore economies. …International organisations have launched various initiatives to try to get OFCs to tighten supervision, co-operate more with foreign governments to catch tax cheats and, at least in Europe, eliminate “harmful” tax practices. OFCs think such initiatives are designed to force them out of business. The countries that set these standards “are an oligopoly trying to keep out smaller competitors. They are both players and referees in the game. How can they be objective?”, asks Richard Hay, a lawyer in Britain who represents OFCs. …the broader concern over OFCs is overblown. Well-run jurisdictions of all sorts, whether nominally on- or offshore, are good for the global financial system.

A column in the Financial Times takes an even stronger position. It notes that tax competition encourages more responsible behavior by lawmakers. It also explains that low taxes are not akin to subsidies, and points out that anti-tax-competition advocates will not be satisfied until all pro-growth tax policies are exterminated:

The European Commission seems to recognise no limits in its drive to impose tax harmonisation across Europe. Having issued a sanction against Luxembourg last July for its preferential tax regime on holding companies, Brussels is now trying to put pressure on a country outside the European Union by targeting Swiss cantons’ tax breaks and low business tax rates. Such a move, if it succeeds, will hurt not only the Swiss but all taxpayers in Europe. Tax competition gives you — the entrepreneur or citizen — the opportunity to escape fiscal pressure from your own government by moving to jurisdictions with more favourable tax regimes. It gives strong incentives for all governments to lower taxes, allowing taxpayers to keep more of their money and making markets less distorted. Such tax competition has existed for some time in Europe and is being intensified by globalisation. Luxembourg and Switzerland, for example, can be considered in a sense to be tax havens at Europe’s heart, benefiting not just European but world taxpayers. Those benefits are being undermined by Brussels’ campaign to condemn places with favourable tax regimes. …The Commission has a strange concept of free trade. It is easy to grasp how public subsidies to business — which involve confiscating resources from some parties and giving them to others — should be regarded as “state aid”. But how can the fact that certain taxes are not levied be placed on the same footing? …This harmonisation logic will inevitably lead EU bureaucrats to attack other regimes that benefit taxpayers, be they in the EU or outside. In Ireland, for example, the corporate tax rate is lower than in Swiss cantons and in Estonia undistributed corporate profits are simply not taxed. When can we expect pressure on Ireland to raise its rates or on Estonia to repeal a system that has contributed to its economic dynamism?