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...

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...

We investigate the effect of economic sanctions on trade flows in countries sharing a border with sanctioned states. According to trade models, sanctions are expected to reduce trade flows as they disrupt established trading routes and economic relationships with suppliers and customers....

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Between 2007 and 2018, federal agencies in Brazil confiscated around 1,300 cargoes of smuggled or counterfeit pesticides. These products are often described by industry bodies as more toxic than those legally traded or as ineffective against pests, but there is little information about this type...

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...

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...

Between 2007 and 2018, federal agencies in Brazil confiscated around 1,300 cargoes of smuggled or counterfeit pesticides. These products are often described by industry bodies as more toxic than those legally traded or as ineffective against pests, but there is little information about this type...

Some central banks have maintained overvalued official exchange rates, while unable to ensure that supply of foreign exchange meets legitimate demand for current account transactions at that price. A parallel exchange rate market develops, in such circumstances; and when the spread between the...

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...

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...

This paper explores official trade data to identify patterns of smuggling in international trade. Our main measure of interest is the difference in matched partner trade statistics, i.e., the extent to which the recorded export value in the source country deviates from the reported import value...

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...

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 illicit retailers. HMRC seized almost ten million litres of non-duty paid alcohol in 2010/11, a rise of 30 per cent in two years. The UK...

Some central banks have maintained overvalued official exchange rates, while unable to ensure that supply of foreign exchange meets legitimate demand for current account transactions at that price. A parallel exchange rate market develops, in such circumstances; and when the spread between the...

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...

The paper develops an analytical framework to discuss the determinants of the premium in the black market for dollars in Brazil. While the specific details of the model were chosen with the Brazilian case in mind, the structure of the model is quite general and suitable for application to black...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

This paper examines the effect of drug prohibition on the black market prices of cocaine and heroin. The paper examines the ratio of retail to farmgate price for cocaine, heroin, and several legal goods, and it compares legal versus black market prices for cocaine and heroin. The results suggest...