The Costs of Illicit Trade

Illegal trade is associated with lost profits for other actors, tax evasion and other harmful effects. To date, the costs of such activities have mostly been viewed through the lens of national accounts, but the effects on economic activity as a whole have not been considered. After some opening remarks by Jürgen Storbeck, Dr. Johannes Rieckmann will present an alternative econometric estimation approach relating data on drug seizures in continental Europe to a set of macroeconomic variables. We show that a marginal increase in illicit trade is associated with a decrease in economic growth, the number of students in tertiary education, and spending on research and development.

The virtual PizzaSeminar will take place via Zoom. To register please send an email to info@bigs-potsdam.org.

Speakers:

Jürgen Storbeck is a lawyer with a long career at the Federal Criminal Police Office, the Federal Ministry of the Interior, Interpol, and various UN and EU bodies. He was founding Director and until 2004 the first Executive Director of Europol. Subsequently, Jürgen Storbeck was the Federal Ministry of the Interior’s Commissioner for Security Cooperation with the Gulf States and, from 2006, Head of the Police Department at the Brandenburg Ministry of the Interior. Since 2012, he has been active in the management of various international and national projects on criminal law, crime prevention and security, as well as in various think tanks and scientific advisory boards.

Dr. Johannes Rieckmann has been employed at BIGS as Senior Research Fellow since August 2015. He engages in economics of cyber-security, regulatory policy regarding public and private provision of security services, economic costs of extremism and of violence against police officers and first responders, and  improvement of resilience of cash logistics in times of emergency and crises.