Search results for "organised crime"
showing 10 items of 44 documents
Do terrorism, organized crime (drug production), and state weakness affect contemporary armed conflicts? An empirical analysis
2015
ABSTRACTIn 2014, the UN Security Council emphasized the dangers of terrorism, criminal activity (especially drug production and trafficking), and state weakness in conflict areas. However, neither policy debates nor scholarly analyses have focussed on the potential impact of these elements on conflict dynamics and characteristics, and the investigated partial relationships have led to inconclusive results. This article explores the presence in armed conflicts of terrorist groups among fighting parties, major drug production (indicating the presence of activities typical of criminal organizations), and state failure in the period 1990–2011. Focussing on intrastate conflicts, this article hig…
Estimating the size of the loan sharking market in Italy
2014
In the current economic crisis, the risk is so high that entrepreneurs, commercial activities and even families may turn to the illegal market to obtain liquidity. This article proposes an estimate of the size of the usury credit market in Italy. The estimate is based on the assumption, provided by Guiso1, that before coming to a moneylender the borrower seeks to obtain credit through official channels. The results of our estimates confirm the seriousness of the problem, but provide much lower data than those reported periodically by the media. It is estimated that 372,000 economic activities may have been potentially involved in the usury market in 2012. The volume of loans disbursed in th…
The eio proposal for a directive and mafia trials: Striving for balance between efficiency and procedural guarantees
2013
PD EIO could mark a turning point in the development of “European criminal procedure.” The Proposal will obtain evidence in cross-border cases and is particularly suitable for investigations on the subject of international organized crime. From the long gestation period and the contents of the Proposal emerges, however, the difficulty of making a balance between the investigation of crimes and the guarantees of the individuals involved. The use of collected of evidence from different legal systems is often an overly neglected aspect. Doubt surrounds the regulation of banking instruments, the rules on wiretapping, and all provisions for undercover investigations.
Legal Norms Against the Italian Mafia
2016
Legislation expressly aimed at combating mafia-type crimes in the Italian criminal system has long represented a specific and distinctive set of rules, comprising provisions of criminal law, procedural criminal law and penitentiary law, and including provisions of administrative and civil law of a more preventive kind. However, the law constitutes only one aspect of the complex Italian anti-mafia policy, which indeed results from the combination of several factors, such as human losses, political choices, legislative solutions, evolving case law and reactions of the civil society. In the international arena, among the multiple actors engaged at various levels in the fight against organised …
Organised Crime and the Economy: a Framework for Policy Prescriptions
2014
In this paper we discuss policies to combat organised crime from the perspective of economic analysis. We introduce concepts such as supply and demand for Mafia and the implied notion of equilibrium to build a framework to classify the contexts in which organised crime interferes with the economy. We then use this framework to discuss policy interventions, distinguishing between policies implemented by the State and mobilisation of civil society. We show that using the economic approach helps understand the aspect of persistence of criminal organisations and identify vicious circles of different nature. The broad spectrum of State policies identified includes norms on competition, on the ef…
Tourism and terrorism: conflicts and commonalities
2012
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore why tourists continue to visit troubled and often violent nations, even when there is perceived risk. Tourism and terrorism reflect very different philosophies, but there are also some disturbing commonalities. Both need modern technology to be effective, both rely heavily on media management and both require the manipulation of perceptions and attitudes.Design/methodology/approach – The paper uses historical evidence to examine the rise and fall in world travel and tourism demand related to acts of terrorism.Findings – The paper observes that the Caribbean experienced a 13.5 percent decline in US visitors after the 9/11 terrorist attack in …
Corruption and Organised Crime Signalling Indicators for Foreign Investors as Applied to Eastern European Countries
2021
The former communist countries in Central and Eastern Europe and, implicitly, their economies, went through specific and sometimes asymmetric developments since the fall of the “iron curtain” at the end of the 1980s. During those years, they faced many challenges to create a secure and predictable economic environment for individuals and businesses, local or foreign. We propose a framework that considers legal, social, and economic indicators which can be used by foreign investors to make wise and efficient business decisions. Our main purpose is to expand the traditional economic analysis framework and enrich it with new institutional and societal indicators from the social, quality of lif…
Resisting the extortion racket: an empirical analysis
2018
While the contributions on the organized crime and Mafia environments are many, there is a lack of empirical evidence on the firm’s decision to resist to extortion. Our case study is based on Addiopizzo, an NGO that, from 2004, invites firms to refuse requests from the local Mafia and to join a public list of “non-payers”. The research is based on a dataset obtained linking the current administrative archives maintained by the chambers of commerce and the list updated by the NGO. The objective of this paper is twofold: first, to gather sound data on the characteristics of the Addiopizzo joiners; second to model the probability to join Addiopizzo by a two-level logistic regression model. We …
Measuring the presence of organized crime across Italian provinces: a sensitivity analysis
2020
AbstractThe existing literature identifies different indicators to construct organized crime indices and places equal importance to different concepts of organized crime. This paper examines the sensitivity of organized crime across Italian provinces when different set of indicators and weights are used to combine crime indicators. Our findings suggest that there is a remarkable variation in the distribution of organized crime across Italian provinces based on the choice of indicators and the importance given to different crime indicators. It is also found that the relationship of organized crime with socioeconomic and political factors varies depending on the normative choices made in the …
Geographical distribution of crime in Italian provinces: a spatial econometric analysis
2009
For a long time social sciences scholars from different fields have devoted their attention to identifying the causes leading to commit criminal offences and recently lots of studies have included the analysis of spatial effects. Respect to the Italian crime phenomenon some stylized facts exist: high spatial and time variability and presence of “organised crime” (e.g. Mafia and Camorra) deep-seated in some local territorial areas. Using explanatory spatial data analysis, the paper firstly explores the spatial structure and distribution of four different typologies of crimes (murders, thefts, frauds, and squeezes) in Italian provinces in two years, 1999 and 2003. ESDA allows us to detect som…