How does the Corporate Tax Haven Index relate to the Financial Secrecy Index?

The Financial Secrecy Index (FSI) focuses on the tools that wealthy individuals use to hide their income, wealth or launder their illegal proceeds. The Corporate Tax Haven Index, by contrast, focuses on how multinational enterprises escape tax, and secrecy is only one among several elements (a few of our secrecy indicators are shared between both indexes.

The Financial Secrecy Index and the Corporate Tax Haven Index measure two of the most important aspects of the offshore world: financial secrecy, and corporate profit-shifting (tax avoidance). The two indexes complement each other. Some countries such as Ireland or the Netherlands are fairly transparent and look relatively good in the Financial Secrecy Index -- yet they are among the worst perpetrators in the Corporate Tax Haven Index.

The methods for both indexes are also similar. They each combine an 'aggressiveness' score (for the Financial Secrecy Index, it's a secrecy score, showing how strong the secrecy rules are, while for the Corporate Tax Haven Index, it's a haven score) with a scale weighting, to show how important the jurisdiction is in the tax haven game. These scores are then used to produce an index. An analogy with gun control helps illustrate this. The secrecy or haven scores would be equivalent to how lax a jurisdiction's gun laws are, while the scale weighting would be equivalent to how many guns are sold.