The unprecedented global scale of illegal wildlife trade poses threats to humans and ecosystems. Policies calling for increased enforcement to control illicit trade are rooted in the idea that more enforcement will result in greater deterrence, but as yet it is unclear how the illegal wildlife...

Drogenschmuggeltechniken werden von Drogenkartellen und der organisierten Kriminalität auf verschiedene Weise angewendet, um illegale Drogen über die Grenzen zu schmuggeln: mithilfe von tief fliegenden Flugzeugen, Schnellbooten, Bodypackern und auf vielen anderen Wegen. Dieser Beitrag...

This paper provides evidence of a consistent gap in the value of cultural goods exported from Italy and the value declared by its trading partners in official trade statistics for the period 1994-2021 and discusses it in the context of the literature on illicit trafficking in cultural property,...

This paper explores the impact of illegal markets on modern slavery, focusing on the Brazilian government's complete shutdown of the mahogany market in the late 90s. Utilizing a quasi-experimental design that exploits the natural variation in the occurrence of mahogany trees in Brazilian...

Im grenzüberschreitenden Warenverkehr (v.a. Reiseverkehr o. Postverkehr) liegt die Aufmerksamkeit bei der Kontrolle von Tieren oder Pflanzen auf der Einfuhr von exotischen Exemplaren, die dem Washingtoner Artenschutzübereinkommen CITES (Convention on the International Trade in Endangered...

Money laundering is the process of hiding or disguising the unlawful origin of property and hiding or disguising the true nature, origin, source, location, disposal, ownership or title of property. In other words, money laundering means "laundering" dirty money until it becomes clean. Corrupt...

Narcotic drugs are smuggled from the Americas to Europe and many parts of the World. While opium, cannabis, hashish or other drugs are mainly coming out of Asia or Africa and are channelled and smuggled to Europe mostly on a land passage (or very short maritime routes), cocaine is mostly...

This study develops a computable general equilibrium model for Nigeria, which accounts for informality, tax evasion, and fuel smuggling. By studying the impact of fuel subsidy reform on consumption, tax incidence, and fiscal efficiency, it shows that the presence of illicit activities...

We study the black market for car license plates in Beijing. Black market transactions are unobserved. However, using comprehensive car sales data and an identification strategy based on optimal transport ideas, we can estimate a lower bound for the size of the black market. We find that at...

This paper studies the relationship between Colombia's legal cigarette sales, smuggling, and tobacco taxes. Exploring first the impact taxes have on legal and illegal cigarettes, we find that taxes correlate negatively to legal sales and positively with illicit sales. Second, estimating a demand...

As one of the earliest countries in the Southeast Asia region, Vietnam joined the CITES in 1994.However, they have faced several challenges and practical barriers to preventing and combating illegal wildlife trade (IWT) after 35 years. This first study systematically reviews 29 English journal...

This paper develops a matching model à la Pissarides (2000) to analyze the migrant smuggling market, building on the empirical evidence related to the smuggling of migrants from the Horn of Africa and the Middle East to the European region in the last decade. The model allows us to determine...

The 2011 Arab Spring marked the opening of the Central Mediterranean Route for irregular border-crossings between Libya and Italy, which produced heterogeneous reductions of bilateral smuggling distances between African-European country pairs. We exploit this source of spatial and temporal...

Flexible exchange-rate systems often are not recommended for countries undergoing economic transition. In late 1989, the former Soviet Union instituted exchange-rate flexibility on the limited share of enterprise international transactions channelled through the auction and. later, interbank...

Previous research that investigated the relationship between the black market and the official exchange rate employed cointegration analysis to establish the long-run relationship and Granger causality to detect the short-run causality between the two rates (for a small number of countries). In...

Black bloom is a phenomenon of serious deterioration in shallow-water ecosystems worldwide. This study investigated the effects of algae on the formation of black blooms and the changes of bacterial community using nearly in-situ cores for a 40-day indoor simulation. We designed experiments with...

The discourse about illicit financial flows (IFFs) repeatedly stresses promoting development and equality in the world, but the links between them are much more difficult to ascertain. As defined in relation to Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 16, the concept of what is illicit rests on...

I describe how monitoring and harsher law enforcement reduce the expected economic benefits of crime. I investigate the effect of shifts in legal authorities' surveillance by focusing on junkyards, firms often associated with illegal markets and auto theft. Starting in 2014, many municipalities...

WTO rules support efforts to address the threat of illicit trade in medical products by promoting transparency and predictability and setting the foundation for strengthened border and regulatory controls and enhanced cooperation. This publication explores WTO tools and activities that can help...

Illicit supply networks (ISNs) are composed of coordinated human actors that source, transit, and distribute illicitly traded goods to consumers, while also creating widespread social and environmental harms. Despite growing documentation of ISNs and their impacts, efforts to understand and...

This paper analyzes the different trading networks, the flux of merchandise, and the actors involved in the act of crossing goods through the United States-Mexico border, particularly in the Tijuana-San Diego region. It argues that the line dividing both countries works differently depending on...

My work studies how the construction of international highways and the rise in automobile consumption in northern Mexico during the 1930s and 1940s facilitated the illegal entry of thousands of stolen cars from the United States and encouraged the expansion of vehicle theft in the U.S....

This review critically engages with the debate on the importance of corruption for illicit tobacco trade. It proposes to solve the disagreement in the literature by advancing a nuanced analysis of how different types of corruption are linked to various forms of illicit tobacco trade. It...

I present here selected articles that originated from the Simposio de antropología "entre lo legal y lo illegal" in Monterrey, Mexico, November 2019. These articles focus on Latin American borders: the U.S.-Mexico border, the Brazil-Paraguay border, and the Argentina-Bolivia border. These Latin...

This article aims to explain the smuggling of goods in the Mexico-US border from Wittgenstein's perspective on the worlds of life and language games. This work advocates for an approach that considers the diversity of circumstances, the hierarchical inequalities, the amalgam between actors and...

This paper investigates whether sanctions imposed in the wake of the Ukraine crisis by Western countries and Russia have been evaded by analyzing monthly product-level trade patterns. Consolidating different methods from the literature related to the detection of illicit trade, I find that goods...

A central parameter for evaluating tax policies is the price elasticity of demand for cigarettes. But in many countries this parameter is difficult to estimate reliably due to widespread smuggling, which significantly biases estimates using legal sales data. An excellent example is Canada, where...

Tobacco use is the leading cause of some preventable deaths and it imposes a heavy burden on countries. Realizing the threat that tobacco use inflicts on global public health, the World Health Organization (WHO) has implemented the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) since 2003. Apart...

Why does illegal trade often flourish without formal enforcement, but sometimes fail? Why do illegal trade-reducing policies often fail? Why do States often appear to tolerate illegal trade? A model of trade with cops and robbers provides answers. `Safety in numbers' is a key element: the...

This paper analyzes how enforcement along the U.S.-Mexican border has affected the market for migrant smugglers. Using a unique dataset that links border crossing histories from illegal Mexican migrants to aggregate enforcement and punishment statistics, we find that the effect of enforcement on...

China's trade has three features: high incidence of re-exports through Hong Kong, high degree of trade related to foreign investment, and large amount of `illegal' trade. Re-exports occur when imports to Hong Kong are consigned to a buyer in Hong Kong, who adds a markup, and exports the goods...

In this paper, we develop and estimate a model of commercial smuggling in which some, but not all, firms smuggle a portion of the cigarettes they sell. The model is used to examine the effects on interstate cigarette smuggling of the Contraband Cigarette Act and a change in the federal excise...

This paper provides an economic analysis of underground gun markets drawing on interviews with gang members, gun dealers, professional thieves, prostitutes, police, public school security guards and teens in the city of Chicago, complemented by results from government surveys of recent arrestees...

The ineffectiveness of real devaluation as stabilization policy does not imply that the nominal exchange rate should be held constant in the face of a domestic inflation. In this circumstance, import duties and export subsidies would have to be escalated to counter the potential erosion of the...

We examine how market structure and enforcement affect smuggling and welfare in a model where smuggling is camouflaged by legal sales. Conditions are given for when some, but not necessarily all, firms smuggle. With camouflaging, the market price is below the price when all sales are legal, so...

Smuggling has become a huge global menace which has continued to impact on the activity of locally manufactured good. The study examined the effect of smuggling on performance of small and medium scale enterprises in Ekiti state. The study adopted survey approach in which questionnaire was the...

IEA discussion paper shows the Treasury is losing as much as £1.2 billion every year to the illegal alcohol industry.Executive summary:One in ten bottles or cans of beer sold in the UK have not had duty paid on them and there are growing reports of counterfeit spirits being sold by licit and...

The uniform fuel subsidies lead to social and economic distortions including smuggling to neighboring countries with higher fuel prices. However, fuel smuggling can also serve to mitigate poverty in deprived places around the borders. Despite myriad studies on various economic impacts of fuel...

We design an adaptive framework for the detection of illegal trading behavior. Its keycomponent is an extension of a pattern recognition tool, originating from the field of signalprocessing and adapted to modern electronic systems of securities trading. The new methodcombines the flexibility of...