Andorra has negative unemployment. How do they do it? More importantly, how can the United States take advantage of it?
Invade Andorra
Ted Rall
Ted Rall is a syndicated political cartoonist for Andrews McMeel Syndication, WhoWhatWhy.org and Counterpoint. He is a frequent contributor to The Wall Street Journal, a graphic novelist and author of many books of art and prose, and an occasional war correspondent. He is, recently, the author of the graphic novel "The Stringer."
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Oh, teacher, I know the answer to that: isn’t Andorra one of those God-awful, “tax havens”? It also has a 100th of the population of New York City. Wonder why you didn’t pick Dubai as an example to your point, if there was one.
I could be wrong but I have never heard of Andorra being a tax haven. Many cartoonists have, however, suggested it would be a good place to invade including Dilbert’s Scott Adams (Adams suggested that it was a good private sector investment to invade with hired mercenaries instead of publicly with the US army. Not that there really is much of a difference any more except that mercenaries cost more.)
I wonder how many of their citizens work in Spain or France? I just looked up some pictures, it looks like an awesome place to live
@bucephalus: ah you are right, Andorra does appear on a number of European tax haven lists. Of course all the lists of tax havens that I can find that list Andorra also list Ireland and Spain as roughly equivalent to Andorra, so its not exactly an especially good tax haven like Monaco or something.
Also when trying to evaluate its tax haven status I noticed a number of evaluations that state it is actually not a particularly good tax haven, such as this here [0] (I’ll be the first to admit that the preceding review in endnote #0 of Andora’s tax haven status is probably biased as the people writing it are associated with companies in Panama, another tax haven that they are trying to promote via their services.)
Even still, Andorra’s perceived tax haven status doesn’t really seem to be responsible for its negative employment and impressive GDP per capita. Only a couple jobs are generated as a handful of billionaires stuff some money in one or two banks which develop interest on their accounts mainly by investing in the economies of other countries thus benefiting Andorra but only very little.
It seems though Andorra’s real source of wealth and employment is actually tourism. Andorra has only 84,082 residents [1] who deal with 10.2 million visitors annually accounting for 80% of GDP [2]. That is 121.3 Tourists per citizen spending money in your country every year that was made elsewhere. THAT is where Andorra’s wealth and employment statistics come from.
You could recreate Andorra if you took about 14 copies of Aspen Colorado, approximately tripled their combined land, declared them their own country, then physically cut them out of the surface of the planet (beautiful mountains, ski-resorts, wildlife, and all) and transplanted them to places with quick and easy transportation access to all the major population centers in the North East. Instant American Andorra.
It is also nice to note their their heavily socialized health care system [3] has helped give them the second highest life expectancy in the world [4].
0: http://www.panamalaw.org/jurisdictions_to_avoid_andorra.html
1: http://www.estadistica.ad/serveiestudis/noticies/noticia311cat.pdf
2: http://www.estadistica.ad/serveiestudis/web/exportar_banc_dades_csv.asp?formules=anual|inici&any1=01/01/2008&any2=01/01/2008&codi_divisio=380&lang=1&codi_subtemes=59&codi_tema=10
3: Travailler en Andorre (May 2006), Govern d’Andorra, Servei d’Ocupació, p.30.
4: http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/04/23/andorra.life.expectancy/index.html