convergence

Chapter 3
Can We Estimate the Global Scale
and Impact of Illicit Trade?
Justin Picard
The Need for a Better Measurement of Illicit Trade
“Fighting a war” is the longstanding idea of how the problem of illicit markets should be
addressed. President Richard Nixon initially coined the term war on drugs during a press
conference in 1971, and it has since been adopted for other forms of trafficking such as counterfeiting
and so-called modern slavery. But illicit trade is now increasingly characterized as a
“whack-a-mole” problem: 1 while the trade may decrease following successful law enforcement
efforts, it usually resumes after a time or switches to a different illegal commodity. One might
note, however, that Darwinian whack-a-mole is the order of the day, as enforcement efforts
may have the perverse effect of facilitating the “selection” of the most apt or powerful criminals.
According to Nils Gilman’s fourth rule on deviant globalization, “Once a deviant industry
professionalizes, crackdown merely promotes innovation.” 2
Two important themes of this book are that illicit markets are connected problems
primarily driven by supply and demand, and that their impacts are more important than the
criminal actors themselves. This chapter addresses the challenge of measuring the collective
size and impact of illicit markets and networks. According to the 2011 White House Strategy
to Combat Transnational Organized Crime, the issue appears to demand urgent policy attention:
“The expanding size, scope, and influence of transnational organized crime and its impact on
U.S. and international security and governance represent one of the most significant of those
[21 st -century] challenges.” 3 Such statements on the size and growth of the problem and its
impacts are often heard, but rarely supported with reliable statistics and sound measurement.
One goal of this chapter is to set the foundations for which the qualitative claims that have been
made on the size and harm caused by illicit activities can be translated into a quantitative form.
Certainly, some data are already available that suggest the impressive magnitude of illegal
markets. For example, the Web site Havocscope.com aggregates publicly available sources of
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