Assessing the stability of a jurisdiction for a family and a business

A relocation is a twenty-year decision made with information about this year. The tax rate and the programme terms are the least durable inputs available. These are the things that actually predict.

Institutional indicators

• Rule of law and judicial independence. Whether a contract with a local counterparty means anything is the foundational question for both a family and a business.
• Property rights, and specifically the history of expropriation, restitution disputes and title reform.
• Currency regime. Convertibility, exchange controls, and whether proceeds of a sale can leave. This decides the exit before anything else does.
• Banking access for foreign residents, and whether the country's institutions have correspondent relationships that function.
• The tax system's stability, not its rate. A country that has rewritten its regime three times in a decade will do it again.

Political indicators

• How power changes hands, and whether policy survives it.
• Attitude to foreign residents in public discourse, which is a leading indicator of programme closures and tax changes.
• External relationships: membership of unions, sanctions exposure, and dependence on a single trading partner.

Practical indicators for a family

• Healthcare at the age you will be, not the age you are.
• Schools, and what happens when a child needs a curriculum that transfers.
• Whether you can leave. Airlift, and whether your other nationality's country will readmit you.
• Whether the status accumulates, which decides what you have after twenty years.

The test to apply

Take each element of your plan and ask what happens to it if the government changes, if the currency moves thirty percent, and if the specific programme you used closes. A plan that survives all three is durable. A plan that depends on one tax regime, one programme and one exchange rate is a bet with a twenty-year horizon, and those are the ones that end badly.