Via the Tax Justice Network – “The 2015 Financial Secrecy Index (FSI) focuses on 93 jurisdictions, including several that are not traditionally considered to be tax havens, such as China, France, Germany and Japan. Secrecy jurisdictions set up laws and systems which provide legal and financial secrecy to others, elsewhere. Our index shows that there is no clear dividing line between “secrecy jurisdictions” (or tax havens) and others. They exist on a wide spectrum. The FSI measures two things, one qualitative and one quantitative. The qualitative measure looks at a jurisdiction’s laws and regulations, international treaties, and so on, to assess how secretive it is. It gets assigned a secrecy score: the higher the score, the more secretive the jurisdiction. The second, quantitative, measurement attaches a weighting to take account of the jurisdiction’s size and overall importance the global market for offshore financial services. We explain the weighting here; full details of our methodology are here; and we provide full details of how we calculate each secrecy indicator here…”