RESEARCH

Andrea Binder leads the Freigeist Research Group Geopolitics in the Age of Offshore Finance and is Co-Principal Investigator of the research project Powering Wealth. She is based at the Otto-Suhr-Institute of Political Science, Freie Universität Berlin. Her research focuses on international political economy and humanitarian politics, with particular attention to offshore finance, family-based economic structures, and energy.

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BOOK

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Offshore Finance and State Power (Oxford University Press, 2023)

 

Offshore financial centers such as Luxembourg, the Cayman Islands or the City of London provide non-residents with a legal framework that is strong on property rights and soft on taxation and regulation. Building on a historical-institutionalist comparison of Britain, Germany, Brazil, and Mexico, Offshore Finance and State Power asks how these offshore financial services affect the power of the state. Combining a concept analysis with empirical research, the book finds that economic actors go offshore to create money more than to hide it. Legal offshore banking trumps tax planning or money laundering in its impact on state power.

Offshore Finance and State Power also reveals that the relationship between the two is not straightforward. Offshore finance can limit state power by transmitting the volatility of unregulated offshore banking into the domestic economy. Yet, counterintuitively, offshore finance can also enhance state power. It provides governments with an extraterritorial vehicle to cover up political conflicts over how to finance the state and to mitigate class conflict. To which extent a state can put offshore finances at its own service, depends on a country's domestic elite constellation and the tax and bank bargains they have forged throughout history.

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BACKGROUND

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Andrea Binder is a first-generation academic and, because of some twists of fate, holds a PhD in Politics and International Studies from the University of Cambridge, where she was a Gates Cambridge Scholar. Her dissertation received the Körber Foundation’s German Dissertation Award in 2020. She holds an M.A. in political science, economics, and rhetoric from the University of Tübingen.

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She was a visiting scholar at the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas (CIDE) in Mexico and the Fundação Getúlio Vargas (FGV) in Brazil. She is a member of Die Junge Akademie and a non-resident fellow at the Global Public Policy Institute (GPPi), Berlin.

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PUBLICATION

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Publications and CV can be found here.