convergence

Global Scale and Impact of Illicit Trade
business to interact with criminals and more generally to participate in illegal markets, the
frontier between market-based and commercial crimes is blurred.
Measuring Impacts
The usual way to measure the global impact of illicit activities is to sum up their respective
market size. If the market size is not available, in general any monetary measurement associated
with the market will be used. This allows a straightforward comparison between illicit
markets, while a simple addition yields a global estimate. One must be cautious though, since
as we have seen before, some of the illicit markets that claim the largest market value have the
most questionable statistics.
The deeper problem, however, is that market values, even if they are correctly estimated,
are only one indicator of the impacts, which does not necessarily provide a fair metric for
comparison. Compared to the market in counterfeit goods and illegal drugs, the market in
endangered species might be one to two orders of magnitude less, and the market in stolen
organs three times smaller. However, one may question whether the harm they are causing
is proportionally less significant, and therefore focusing on the illicit market size can be
misleading. This is not to say that market size is not a useful figure. As we will see, it is a
helpful starting point for measuring the degree of nuisance of organized crime, its corrosive
impact on society and institutions, and the overall indirect impacts on trade. However, it
is not necessarily a relevant indicator of general social, economic, or environmental harm.
Therefore, in pursuing the goal of finding a global measurement of the scale and impact
of illicit trade, we should consider adjusted methods for measuring the harm caused by
different illicit activities.
Any illicit market can have impacts in multiple categories. For example, counterfeiting
creates costs and lost revenues for both businesses and government, causes job loss, and involves
health and safety risks. It also creates intangible costs, such as a general loss of trust in institutions,
and political tensions between states. And nearly any illicit market involves criminal
activities that impact the security of citizens, undermine the authority of states, erode the social
fabric, criminalize society, and generate an overall cost of crime that must be borne by society.
As the types of impacts can be numerous, it is convenient to use the compact “direct/indirect
impacts” typology from UNDOC. 39 It is described in the following way:
The real threat of organized crime cannot be reduced to the violence associated with
criminal markets. Rather, it is best described under two headings: Direct impacts,
which are essentially the reasons each criminal activity was prohibited in the first place;
Indirect impacts, in particular the ways organized crime as a category undermines the
state and legitimate commercial activity.
According to this typology, direct impacts are specific to the direct externalities of a profit-driven
crime, excluding the crime-related consequences.
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