You also need things like a foreign service to liaise with other countries so that the fate of your state isn't the same as the Thai SeaStedding adventure. Then you may also need things in the longer term like social services, pension funds etc to care for your citizens in the long term.
Those all need to be paid for somehow, and that somehow is taxes. A "low tax" environment inevitably has to skimp on those services somehow. I'd guess that these low tax environments intention would be to skimp on the services that richer people don't need in exchange for having those richer people pay less tax...
So I'm not really surprised by the comments in the article that they're having trouble getting "host" countries to buy into this, what's the upside for them? These low tax environments will obviously not provide good long term environments for workers (the low tax is likely to == low social care standards) so it'd seem likely they'll take in workers where it's suitable and ship them back out once they're not productive any more, back to the host countries they came from.