Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers, and Copycats are Hijacking the Global Economy

by Moisés Naím

Book Overview

Siempre han existido contrabandistas, traficantes y piratas, pero nunca como en los ?ltimos tiempos, con la capacidad de operar a nivel mundial conectando los lugares m?s remotos del planeta y las... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1400078849
• ISBN13: 9781400078844
• Release Date: October 2006
• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Length: 352 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.4" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Criminals without borders

What do fake Rolex watches sold in New York street fairs have in common with DVDs on sale in Hong Kong, with prostitution in Phnom Penh, and with breached fences between Mexico and Texas? They are all manifestations of a new world phenomenon, illicit trade. With globalization eliminating the restrictive controls imposed on international trade, goods and services flow more freely, but of course the intention is for legitimate business to take place. Unfortunately the mushrooming of legitimate business flows and activities have created a stream in which illegal business can travel undetected alongside legitimate trading. Because controls have for all practical purposes been abolished, illegal business deals can hide much more easily. This effect was unintended, largely unforeseen, and it is what links child prostitutes in Bangkok to illegal immigrant workers in the US. Moisés Naím comprehensively describes the most important areas of the illicit global trade. The first two chapters explain the concept of illicit trade and smuggling, then following chapters examine individual illicit industries: the arms trade, the drug trade, the slave trade, intellectual property theft, the human organ trade, etc. Naím concludes that because of the volumes and of the amounts of money involved, none of this trade would be possible without tacit government and corporate support, usually in the form of outright corruption or passive acceptance. He describes how money from illicit operations is laundered to appear legitimate. One surprising finding is how drugs, because they are compact, are used to move profits around: the million dollar haul from an illegal lumber trade is more easily carried around as a pound of pure heroin than as a large suitcase full of cash! He also describes how government agencies are corrupted, and how the very structure of government service keeps them from cooperating effectively. And that's _within_ a country! Between agencies in different countries, it is even more difficult to build trusting relationships. Naím isn't completely without hope. He shows journalists as being effective investigators, at great peril to their lives. He sees non-government organizations (NGOs) as being innovative, flexible, and driven in a way government agencies cannot hope to ever be. He closes with advice on what we can do as private individuals to stem what he calls the hijacking of the global economy. Vincent Poirier, Tokyo

Same Business Savy/Muscle As Wal-Mart

"In todays labyrinthine routings of contraband across multiple contients, front companies are easy to set up, dozens in order to blur one's trace. As a result intermediaries in international commerce of illicit products, services , & humans have increased their profile and their profits. It is the brokers who control today's illicit markets, set the deals, & make the big money".This is a small snipet of the market place. The markets are just markets/ legal or illegal. Governments decide the righteousness of them. In other words: what is in a true market: cent$, can now be dollar$. It is the magic of a legalized highway robbery called the stroke a pen. Of course its a no brainer that governmemnts are getting greased to hell and back. Through corporate(legal/illegal) sugar daddys or just down and dity in your face corruption. It has penetrated deeply into the private sector, politics, and governments of today. It is penetrating markets deeper, plus horizontally and vertically, and in direct proportion to their profits that control crucial decisions within current national governments (U.S. included). In some cases the national interests are completely aligned with illegal profits. A must read for understanding the a whole picture the global economy. It is an entertaining and informative read. Welcome to globalization. And of course that is on either side of the border: because they own both sides!

Attacking Illicit Trade

Illicit is a thought-provoking, though somewhat derivative, study of modern-day transnational crime and the challenges it poses to governments. The significance of interconnections between globalization, illicit trade, and world politics has long been apparent to specialists, if not to inveterate cold warriors and rarefied academic traditionalists. The writer skimps a little on important topics; for example, there is much more to the "loose nukes" problem than the machinations of A.Q. Khan and his associates. However, the chapters are generally an excellent read. As a one-time consultant for Microsoft in greater China, I found the chapter on the cross-cutting economic implications of counterfeiting especially insightful. Effective countermeasures to illicit trade are necessarily elusive.The author is critical of supply-side enforcement, and indeed it hasn't worked well for drugs and other mass-market commodities. He suggests that to "stand between millions of customers desperate to buy and millions of merchants desperate to sell and stop them" may be asking too much of governments. Demand-side remedies may work better, though for items with great destructive potential, demand-reduction equates to conflict resolution--a long-term and uncertain proposition at best. In such areas, interdiction and source control programs-- locking down Russian nuclear warheads and materials, for example--remain indispensable guarantees of international security and stability.

The Bureaucracy vs. The Network

Illicit bursts with detail and example, though it contains very little in the way of illustrative anecdotes. The author seems mainly concerned with communicating two main points. First, our conceptions about the nature and organizational structure of international trafficking networks has fallen dangerously out of date. Second, operating assumptions and ideological sacred cows prevent governments from framing the problem of illicit trafficking in a way that will allow for constructive action. Concerning the first point, the "cartel and kingpin" conception of narco-trafficking formed and propagated in the 80's no longer applies. Our present counter-narcotics strategies assume that the enemy organization has a hierarchical structure with information and power flowing up and down a chain of command. In fact, trafficking organizations these days take the form of decentralized networks which shift continuously, assuming new configurations as opportunities present themselves and then morphing again to meet the needs of the next moment. Also, today's traffickers don`t specialize in a single commodity like cocaine. Instead, they move whatever goods present an opportunity for profit in the present moment; drugs today, arms tomorrow, people the next day and then knock-off designer handbags after that. Only the small players at the beginning and end of the supply chain specialize in particular products, e.g. the Bolivian coca farmer and the illegal immigrant selling bootlegged DVDs or knock-off Rolexes on the streets of New York. The author's second point concerns two ideological sacred cows. First, he warns against the politically entrenched practice of talking about illicit traffic in strictly moral terms. Government officials denounce illicit traffickers as evil-doers rather than acknowledging that traffickers act from economic motives determined by market forces. Drugs and other illicit goods bring great financial reward when moved from one place where traffickers can purchase them at a low price to some other place where they command a high price. Adaptive systems like markets and networks make short work of the kinds of problems that prohibition-minded bureaucratic hierarchies place in their way. Talking about illicit trafficking in economic rather than moral terms would produce a more intelligent discussion and offer more effective courses of action. Here and there throughout the early chapters, the author drops the occasional hint that he advocates legalizing marijuana, and at the book's end he makes that point explicit. In a free society marked by an ever-increasing volume of international trade, governments will have to pick their battles. Spending billions to try to interrupt the traffic in marijuana makes no sense if we hope to make any headway curtailing the trade in nuclear weapons technology, radiological materials and sex slaves. Don't mistake Naim for any kind of Libertarian. He makes it quite clear that he wants to see governments

Definitive Volume--$2T/Year and Growing, Lost Government Revenues

I have known Moises Naim for many years, and admired his pragmatic approach to managing the content of Foreign Policy, as published under the auspices of the Canegie Endowment for International Peace. He has been Minister of Trade and Industry in Venezuela, a dean and professor of business administration, executive director of the World Bank, and an accomplished thinker and author. Above all he has been moral. He gets it: morality in politics and morality in business are priceless. This book is important in two very big ways: the first, the one that most are noticing, is that it documents very ably the fact that crime pays--the author has done a superb job of itemizing the global illegal trade industry in a manner that could be understood by anyone, and the bottom line is frightening in that illicit trade is perhaps $2 trillion a year, while legal trade is between $5 trillion and $10 trillion. Off-the-books bartering and immoral invoicing within corporations are additional reducers of government tax revenue--import export tax fraud in the USA is known to be $50 billion a year ($25 rocket engines going out, $10 pencils coming in). The second reason this book is important, the real value of this book, is in documenting the revenues lost to government. Legalizing prostitition has economic as well as public health implications. Reducing the arms trade, where the US is the greatest exporter of violence and bribery, has implications across ethnic conflict, stability, water and oil conservations, and so on. Eliminating counterfeiting and illegal immigration would have enormous implications for positive constructive government revenue. I personally know where $500 billion a year can be found in additional tax revenue for the US, mostly from eliminating pork barrel subsidies and corporate fraud, and by restoring the traditional share of corporations to the tax fund--when Halliburn pays $15M on billions in profit, when Exxon makes $3 billion in profit in a single quarter with no requisite tax bite, the system is broken. Eliminating crime, and corporate crime, provides the financial foundation for restoring the democratic contract, the social contract, with the working class and the middle class. Moises Naim has, in brief, delivered the seminal work on one of the five factors that will determine how the human species does in its World War with itself and with bacteria. The other four factors are the end of cheap oil, the end of free water, the virulent re-emergence of infectuous diseases accompanied by the mutation and migration of new diseases from animal hosts to humans; and the promising but by no means assured emergence of collective democratic intelligence, perhaps aided by real-life decision support games such as those produced by BreakAwayLtd.com. I consider Dr. Naim to be one of the most precious intellects now active--as penetrating but more pragmatic than Joe Nye, as strategic but more pragmatic as Zbigniew Brzezinski, as articulate