Fabulous chart in FT story meant to disconcert you: global crime gangs' muscle growing--yet another thing for me to fear!
So I look through the article for the summing up dollar figure and get $130B, with $105B of that being drugs.
Then I check the size of the global economy, because the number I have stuck in my head from my NewRulesSets.Project days with Cantor at the start of the 2000s is $30T. Well, the global economy is now twice that size, or about $60T, and despite conventional wisdom, all that money didn't go into the pockets of Goldman Sachs (about $12B in profit in 2009).
Of that global economy, about 1/3rd is traded ever year. For example, in 2008 (and 2010's numbers will be roughly similar after recovering from 2009) the global merchandise trade (stuff) came to $16T and the service trade was almost $4T, so a total of $20T (see this WTO report). So you put $130B over $20T and get rid of all those matching zeros, and your equation becomes 130 over 20,000 (please catch any mistakes here), and when I reduce it further, I come up with 65 over 10,000, then 13 over 2,000, and then 1 over about 150.
And then my heart rate slows and I don't feel so freaked out. Global crime equals less than 1% of global trade?
Now let's assume the UN calculations are way off, and the global crime numbers are 5 times larger!
So I start with $650B and I come up with a fraction more like 1/30. Does anyone expect to live in a world where there isn't crime that equals 3% of legal economic trade (understanding that means the UN stats miss 80% of all global crime)
Again, please tell me where my math is wrong.
Does it sound to you like criminal gangs are running the world?
Yes, there are aggregate estimates of illicit activity that run higher than the UN's focus here, and they're always bulked up overwhelmingly by estimates of illegal financial flows (for example, there are credible estimates of $1T a year of illicit financial flows from developing to developed markets). If you want to run with such aggregate estimates, fine, but the UN's record on statistics is pretty good, and here I'm comparing apples (smuggling stuff and people) to apples (legal trade in merchandise and services), not adding in money flows and then comparing that fantastically boosted total to just global trade--a typical misleading trick of those who like to scare people. Because if you add up global financial flows, you're into a whole new scale and if you engage in legitimate apples-to-apples comparisons there, your percentages will yield the same small fractions.