Panama, a small nation of just four million people, has a booming financial services sector that, including revenue from its famous canal, accounts for nearly 80% of gross domestic product.
It has one of the best sustained economic growth rates in latin America, low inflation, and uses the US dollar as its currency.
Successive Governments have strenuously sought to portray the country as a business-friendly financial hub akin to Singapore that actively encourages banking and investment. But they have found it hard to shake a widely held image of Panama as a place where shady deals are done in secret to hide money from tax authorities and launder the proceeds of the rich, the powerful and the criminal. After coming under heavy scrutiny in recent years from other countries Panama has cleaned up its act somewhat, enough to get off an international “blacklist” of suspected money-laundering states.