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The purpose of this study is to examine the efficacy of various policy options for curbing the accumulation of illegal wealth and suggest ways to close the increasing wealth inequality gap.

The paper begins with a historical/literary analysis of the place of wealth in American Society and the ambivalent cultural attitudes toward wealth. Different policy approaches that seek to limit wealth inequality and the illegal accumulation of wealth are then examined. Finally, the current policy climate in the USA is reviewed to determine the likelihood of meaningful reform.

In Europe, the BASEL accords show promise for curbing the illegal accumulation of wealth by politically exposed persons. In the USA, tax reform efforts can close the wealth gap, but the current political landscape makes meaningful reform challenging particularly given the increasing use of “dark” money to influence elections.

Because financial reform is a moving target in both Europe and the USA, subject to the ebb and flow of political forces, it is difficult to predict what major reforms will be possible.

Without meaningful reform, an increase in populist movements can be expected (e.g. Brexit and Trump) with an overall, long-term negative impact on democratic capitalism.

The wealth gap and the sense that the system is rigged against the common people will result in increasing political turmoil.

Combining literary/historical analysis with the analysis of current policy interventions provides a set of tools not usually used in the examination of financial crimes.

The paper examines certain problems in determining the extent of money‐laundering. The author first discusses the methodological problems inherent in assessing its volume. He then discusses two methods to estimate the extent of money‐laundering. One method is based on the cash‐flow which is generated by many forms of organised crime trade. In cross‐border money‐laundering constructions the banknotes have to be repatriated to the countries of origin. This creates a registered money trail which may be used to estimate the upper limit of money‐laundering in a national economy. The other method is the one used by the Financial Action Task Force of the G‐7. This method is based on the questionable assumption that 10 per cent of the drug trade is intercepted by the police. The author demonstrates the shortcomings of the FATF method which uses the street price level for its calculations. He warns against politically motivated inflated estimates and stresses the necessity for a methodologically responsible empirical research of this phenomenon.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how corruption has changed over time in South Korea and to explore how the corruption control and prevention efforts of the Korean government have been successful and failed.

This paper draws on institutional theory to formulate a qualitative analysis to assess the effectiveness of anti-corruption policies and measures, and to identify the strengths and weaknesses of anti-corruption reform efforts in South Korea.

This paper argues that while the Korean government has been quite successful in building anti-corruption institutions to control low-level petty corruption, it has failed to institutionalize anti-corruption institutions to curb high-level grand corruption.

While many studies have attempted to identify the successful factors of fighting corruption, this paper draws a theoretical distinction between institution-building vs institutionalization to examine the success and failure of corruption control and prevention efforts in South Korea.

The purpose of this study is to address the question that economic standards, norms and regulations can possess weak spots that might be exploitable for the embezzlement of an organization’s assets with resultant material consequences in money laundering,tax evasion, fraud, corruption and other potential financial crimes.

The author’s methodological approach is to introduce and discuss a new logical-deductive test that the author names “embezzler test”. The author’s test investigates regulatory architectures from the perspective of someone attempting to divert assets from or to an organization. It appraises whether a potential embezzler could divert resources without being detected and sanctioned.

The embezzler test can be applied to a broad range of standards, norms and regulations.

This new test can be improved and further calibrated in future research.

Researchers, regulators and law makers can use the new test to identify and eventually fix weak spots for embezzlement in norms, standards and regulations.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, such a test has never been formulated or applied before to identify weak spots for potential embezzlement in regulatory architectures.

This chapter develops a neoclassical growth model of illegal immigration with imperfect substitutability between native and immigrant workers in production. We investigate analytically and/or numerically the effects of illegal immigration on the average capital stock in the host economy as well as on the wage, income, and asset holdings of native workers. Our findings indicate that the effects of an increase in illegal immigration on the average levels of capital, consumption, and income are positive. Moreover, by employing the normalization technique (e.g., Klump & de La Grandville, 2000), we examine the effects of a change in the elasticity of substitution between immigrant workers and natives for any given immigration ratio. These effects are in general ambiguous, because of the presence of two opposing forces: the efficiency and the distribution effects. Finally, we extend the model by separating the domestic workers into skilled and unskilled and study the impact on distribution of income and wealth. We show that illegal immigration may not necessarily make the distribution of wealth more unequal and unskilled labor worse off. This is because the end results depend on the elasticities of substitution between different types of labor. Thus, assuming erroneously that immigrants and natives are perfect substitutes could lead to results that are not only overestimated but also of the wrong sign.

Analyzing how the post-Soviet transition interacts with the crisis of market finance exhibits a new “greed-based economic system” in the making. Asset grabbing is at its core and hinders capital accumulation. All the various privatization schemes have triggered off asset grabbing, asset stripping, and asset tunneling. A global contagion of such behavior has spread the power and cohesion of managers/shareholders (oligarchs) worldwide. Financial asset grabbing is less straightforward, though much widespread, and operates in financial markets through new financial products, securitization, firms buying their own shares, hedge funds, stock price manipulation, short selling, and the distribution of stock options.Shadow banking, and more generally a global informal economy, results from grabbing strategies in financial markets that breach the formal rules of capitalism. In alleviating and circumventing the rules, the oligarchy paves the way for economic malpractices and crime, calling capitalist laws into question.In such context, systemic greed underlies unconstrained maximization of relative wealth, for which asset grabbing is a rational means, in a winner-take-all economy. At the present stage of our research, a greed-based economy cannot yet be theoretically defined as a transition either to a new phase of capitalism or to another different system.

Allyn Young′s lectures, as recorded by the young Nicholas Kaldor, survey the historical roots of the subject from Aristotle through to the modern neo‐classical writers. The focus throughout is on the conditions making for economic progress, with stress on the institutional developments that extend and are extended by the size of the market. Organisational changes that promote the division of labour and specialisation within and between firms and industries, and which promote competition and mobility, are seen as the vital factors in growth. In the absence of new markets, inventions as such play only a minor role. The economic system is an inter‐related whole, or a living “organon”. It is from this perspective that micro‐economic relations are analysed, and this helps expose certain fallacies of composition associated with the marginal productivity theory of production and distribution. Factors are paid not because they are productive but because they are scarce. Likewise he shows why Marshallian supply and demand schedules, based on the “one thing at a time” approach, cannot adequately describe the dynamic growth properties of the system. Supply and demand cannot be simply integrated to arrive at a picture of the whole economy. These notes are complemented by eleven articles in the Encyclopaedia Britannica which were published shortly after Young′s sudden death in 1929.

This book is a policy proposal aimed at the democratic left. It is concerned with gradual but radical reform of the socio‐economic system. An integrated policy of industrial and economic democracy, which centres around the establishment of a new sector of employee‐controlled enterprises, is presented. The proposal would retain the mix‐ed economy, but transform it into a much better “mixture”, with increased employee‐power in all sectors. While there is much of enduring value in our liberal western way of life, gross inequalities of wealth and power persist in our society.

To explore the moral position of Baumol’s theory of productive, unproductive and destructive entrepreneurship; Ross’s (1907) concept of the ‘criminaloid’ and Sutherland’s (1949a, 1949b) theories of white-collar crime, as applied to ‘popular illegalities’ (Lea, 2003) and the activities of entrepreneurs who operate primarily as small/medium enterprise (SME); artisans; and tradespeople as they interact with an emerging affluent working class.

Provides a framework of key texts that explore the concepts of morality, legality and ethics when applied to the theoretically unexplored concept of criminal entrepreneurism, as a function of working class survival and capital accumulation. Research for this chapter included the analysis of government reports into the illicit activities of ‘professional’ and ‘non-professional’ bodies; personal observation of street corner shops.

Provides a critical analysis of theories that advocate rule avoidance and evasion as an acceptable process of developing successful entrepreneurs and the controversial theories of white-collar crime that focus on ‘high status’ actors operating at the corporate level. It identifies a necessary relationship and complicity between clients (victims) and practitioners as key elements in the commission of deviant acts, as victims expand their social, economic and cultural capital.

By combining philosophies of entrepreneurism, theories of white, blue and collarless crime and a reconsideration of moral business principles, this chapter introduces a new construct of deviancy as a ‘positive’ outcome that reject the need for criminal justice agencies intervention.