Pre-print available at Researchgate: lnkd.in/dipsJkH2

We shift the analyrical lens from the politics of membership on the practice of offshoring goods and services. Leveraging a new CBI global dataset (1960–2023), we learn that microstates, middle-income countries, and tax havens are more likely to adopt CBI.

The workings of Citizenship-by-investment (CBI) programs are highly controversial, and their adoption is subject of much scholarly disagreement. In this paper, we look at why countries put their citizenship up for sale.

Four, can this actually be implemented? In the US, the Congress normally passes visa-related regulation. But who knows, the world comes up with surprises every day…

Third, being “subject to the same procedures as an original visa applicant, including appropriate screening for public safety and national security” is not enough for these kinds of applications. There are risks of money laundering, which require additional measures

This makes one wonder about the policy purpose - gifting one million USD to the US and to Vanuatu or Malta (amounts are smaller there, but just for the sake of the argument) has a different economic impact

Second, the amount announced in February (5 million USD) is fivefold the amount in the EO. If one looks at other countries operating similar “gift” schemes, they require around 0.5 million and their economies are much smaller than the US one

Residency-by-investment is not uncommon around the world, but it is “gift” (rather than investment) based in a very specific subset of countries worldwide; often, nearly always, such countries have manifest problems of good governance

First, the policy justification is vastly nonsensical. Unlike the existing EB-5, which seeks to attract investors and businesspeople to transfer their activities to the US, this Gold Card introduces “a gift” in exchange for residency rights