How many people per Big Four accounting firm does the territory that use to depend largely on defense expenditure have?
After the border reopened, the British government reduced the military presence in Gibraltar by closing the naval dockyard. The RAF presence was also downgraded; although the airport officially remains an RAF base, military aircraft are no longer permanently stationed there. The British garrison, which had been present since 1704, was withdrawn in 1990 following defence cutbacks at the end of the Cold War. A number of military units continue to be stationed in Gibraltar under the auspices of British Forces Gibraltar; the garrison was replaced with locally recruited units of the Royal Gibraltar Regiment, while a Royal Navy presence is continued through the Gibraltar Squadron, responsible for overseeing the security of Gibraltar's territorial waters. In March 1988 a British military operation against members of the Provisional IRA (PIRA) planning a car bomb attack in Gibraltar ended in controversy when the Special Air Service shot and killed all three PIRA members.The military cutbacks inevitably had major implications for Gibraltar's economy, which had up to that point depended largely on defence expenditure. It prompted the territory's government to shift its economic orientation and place a much greater emphasis on encouraging tourism and establishing self-sufficiency. Tourism in Gibraltar was encouraged through refurbishing and pedestrianising key areas of the city, building a new passenger terminal to welcome cruise ship visitors and opening new marinas and leisure facilities. By 2011, Gibraltar was attracting over 10 million visitors a year compared to a population of 29,752, giving it one of the highest tourist-to-resident ratios in the world.The government also encouraged the development of new industries such as financial services, duty-free shopping, casinos and Internet gambling. Branches of major British chains such as Marks & Spencer were opened in Gibraltar to encourage visits from British expatriates on the nearby Costa del Sol. To facilitate the territory's economic expansion, a major programme of land reclamation was carried out; a tenth of Gibraltar's present-day land area was reclaimed from the sea. These initiatives proved enormously successful. By 2007, Chief Minister Peter Caruana was able to boast that Gibraltar's economic success had made it "one of the most affluent communities in the entire world." As of 2013, Gibraltar is ranked as the second most prosperous territory within the European Union and the 18th most prosperous worldwide in terms of gross domestic product by purchasing power parity per capita (the United Kingdom, for comparison, is 33rd worldwide and Spain is 44th). Today, Gibraltar has one Big Four accounting firm office per 10,000 people, the second highest in the world after the British Virgin Islands, and a bank per 1,700 people, the fifth most banks per capita in the world.
10,000