Last week, the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development, made up of leading developed and emerging market nations such as the US, Germany and China, vowed to crack down on so-called tax havens, drawing up a “blacklist” of nations it says do not co-operate in exposing tax cheats and saying that sanctions – as yet undefined – may be used against transgressors. These nations were Costa Rica, Malaysia, the Philippines and Uruguay. The OECD has also compiled a larger list of states that have, or are just starting to co-operate with countries battling tax evasion, such as Switzerland, the Cayman Islands and Monaco. Interestingly, the OECD gave a totally clean bill of health to such places as Hong Kong, a low-tax special administrative region of China.

It is premature to pronounce the end of offshore financial centres, however, since there are strong reasons why they will thrive even if some jurisdictions erode bank secrecy and make it harder for tax-evaders to hide, industry figures said.

“I think offshore has a future but as far as many jurisdictions now understand it, they must play by the rules,”John Whiting, tax partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers, told WealthBriefing.

Offshore locations are increasingly transparent and professional in how they handle financial affairs; they are also highly convenient for a more mobile global workforce to use as their single point of banking rather than constantly changing their banks as they move about the world, he said.

Joe Field, senior international partner at Withers, the international law firm, agrees. Mr Field points out that those offshore centres that are most likely to endure are jurisdictions that have established a market-leading speciality, such as Bermuda, which is a key domicile for insurance and reinsurance firms, or the Cayman Islands, home to more than 80 per cent of the world's hedge funds.

"I think that places like the Cayman Islands, Channel Islands, Bermuda and British Virgin Islands have a fairly rosy future in the medium term," Mr Field said.

PwC's Mr Whiting says tax havens will also thrive because unless there is eventually a world government with a single tax code, countries will set their own tax rates and seek to attract inward investment and inflows of wealthy people by lowering their tax rates.

And new tax havens are always a possibility, given the still-large benefits of attracting money inflows, Mr Whiting said. “Despite the recent turmoil, the financial market is a very significant way of getting money and wealth into a country. There is plenty of scope for other countries to think that they will try to set up and do something but there will be territories springing up and deciding that they want to have a go,” he said.

Commentators like Mr Whiting argue that such locations have mostly worked hard to raise their reputations for openness in recent years, which will help protect them against hostile pressure from other nations. According to the Economist magazine recently, a political scientist at Australia’s Griffith University proved that the worst examples of bank secrecy, money laundering and fraud happened not in Caribbean Islands or Alpine principalities, but in the world’s largest economies.

Although G20 leaders may find it awkward to say so, the current financial crisis did not originate in tax havens but on their home turf. That is a point that offshore jurisdictions are likely to highlight in the months ahead.