Christopher M. Bruner

How Small Jurisdictions Compete in International Financial Services

The growing prominence of small jurisdictions in cross-border corporate and financial services over recent decades has raised a host of complex and highly contentious issues that remain exceedingly difficult to resolve. How small jurisdictions relate to larger markets in various fields of cross-border finance; what challenges small jurisdictions face as they work to develop capacity in their respective fields of specialisation; and what opportunities might arise that small jurisdictions would be uniquely well positioned to pursue, are all matters that involve numerous professions, disciplines, and regulatory fields. These questions are also intimately bound up with hotly contested political and diplomatic debates regarding the propriety and legitimacy of various modes of cross-border regulatory competition—and as in other such fraught contexts, much turns on how the debate is framed, and the perspective from which one views the issues at hand.