Offshore Financial Centres in the Caribbean: Prospects in a New Environment

摘要

There is need for consolidated supervision in order to mitigate risks from offshore activities to onshore financial systems. In the area of statistics, better coverage is required of offshore activities in order to assess the magnitude and risks of associated activities. Many Caribbean islands depend heavily on tourism and/or agriculture, and are looking to other means of diversifying their economies. To this end, offshore financial sectors are attractive to these countries in the context of diversification. However, under current international standards, newer jurisdictions will face higher costs of compliance with best practices. The more established centres have been able to generate significant amounts of revenues (and perhaps employment). These economies, such as the Bahamas, the Cayman Islands and the British Virgin Islands, have also developed relatively strong and extensive legislative and regulatory frameworks to address regulatory issues. However, even in these countries, additional measures have been required by the various international fora looking into the problems of money laundering. For the newer entrants to this sector, the benefits are not so clear-cut - and this does not even take into account the costs of setting up the required supervisory regulations and institutions together with the training of professional staff.