> This is one of the reasons exit tax has failed miserably around the world: it prevented good business people doing business in punitive countries in the first place.

You have to define the "good" in "good business people". If you are a global scale entrepreneur planning to start a business and looking for country with an educated workforce that has good infrastructure but you need to be able to take your gathered wealth when the business is mature (read you have an obscene amount of wealth) in order to find cheaper less educated workforce to keep up operations in order to generate more wealth for yourself. Then you are a "good" businessman only in the sense that you are good at maximizing your own pile of gold. Morally you are bankrupt. So what does a "punitive" country loose by not letting you reap the benefits of a "high taxes system" for your own personal gains?

So by your logic an employee who only maximizes his "pile of gold" (salary) and is morally bankrupt and should be punitively taxed?!

What should he do, not sleep at night thinking about "the good of the company" to be a "good employee"?!

"punitively taxed" is your words not mine. And yes a employee who reap benefits from taxes but acts in a way to evade taxes is acting in a morally bad way. However, an employee has very limited ways of evading taxes and pressuring countries to change their taxation system to fit his/her idea of what is "good" whereas people at the top of the pyramid are very "good" at doing this.

> Funny enough, people leaving a country do not necessarily want to cut out all investments in said country. Just reside (and pay income taxes) elsewhere.

That's not what the article is talking about.