That's a very important question, and I think it really comes down to the whole issue of transparency and disclosure of information. You think about the impact of deploying these global strategies on real economic activity; the work that I've done has looked at the impact on Canada. What the evidence clearly shows is when Canadian multinationals use the offshore jurisdictions to deploy global strategies, there are positive impacts on Canada.
Coming directly to your question, these are very difficult studies to do. The question is, will these positive benefits be the same in environments where there's a lack of transparency in contrast to environments where there's more transparency, and so on? The evidence tends to indicate that when there is more transparency, then the legitimate use of these offshore centres to deploy global strategies is the motivation.
