Introduction
One of the most obvious clichés that can be recalled when facing the topic of crime is that very strong inter-relations exist between crime and economy. If we exclude the fact that criminals may present particular types of "deviance", power and wealth are their main objectives.
This observation has only recently received attention by the economists who are always very careful in analysing ideal worlds with scarce propensity to delve deeply into the real functioning of the economy.
This new attention can be tied, on the one hand, to the use of techniques by the science of economics allowing the understanding of complex real phenomena and, maybe in a more dazzling manner, to the ever widening awareness of the problems tied to the inequality and to the explosion of criminal economy.
The first essays dealing with these topics appeared during the 70s; I remember those, for example, published in "The Economics of Crime and Punishment", S. Rottemburg (ed.) Washington 1973, in "The Economics of Crime", R. Andreano and J.J. Sieggrfied (eds.) New York 1980, in T.C. Shelling's "Choice and Consequence", Cambridge 1984, and lastly in "Chicago Studies of Political Economy", G.J. Stigler (ed.) Chicago 1988.
In Italy, the problem of organised crime's economics drew attention only at the beginning of the 90s. We should remember that it was examined in a specific meeting of the Italian Society of Economists of 1992, the records were published by S. Zamagni "Illegal Markets and Mafias - The economy of organised crime", Bologna 1993 and during the 1993 Forum organised by the Anti-Mafia Parliamentary Commission, presided by L. Violante "Economy and Crime", Rome 1993.
The lack of interest by the economists towards this problem with the exception of few pioneers, is a guilty omission as starting from the 1930s studies on the imperfections of the market economy had shown the importance of the interconnection between economy and crime.
Even the economist would, therefore, have been able to play a leading role in preventing and containing the criminal phenomenon.
As far as I know, little has been done in this field even by the institutions specifically tasked with fighting crime. Even in this case only a few pioneers have activated useful cognitive, interpretative, and monitoring instruments. We cannot even use as an example the fact that in occasional cases criminals were charged and condemned using fiscal instruments.
Even more difficult to understand is the fact that, in the fight against organised crime, those same instruments of knowledge and economic evaluation that turned out to be so useful when used in confronting other countries were not adequately applied.
In particular, I am referring to the evaluation of the economic potential of a country, of the organisation of its commercial and productive systems, of its resources, both material and immaterial, whether they are available or ready to be "activated" etc.

1. The dimensions and the characteristics of the world's economy
The recent "globalization" of the world's economy has had as a consequence an enormous growth in the commercial and financial flows and in the dimensions of enterprises. This has dramatically fed the development and the consolidation of crime, thereby creating phenomena of such dimensions that have caught even the most clever insiders unaware.
But, everything which has happened in recent years is probably still very little with respect to the development which could take place in the next decades, when all industrialised countries will have entered the "society of information."
They will be flanked by other two groups of countries. One comprises Asian, Latin American and, at least in part, the Mediterranean Basin and Eastern European developing nations; the second comprises nations that today seem to have lost any possibility of catching up with more developed ones and it is predominantly composed of African, Asian and Latin American nations.
For some decades economists have spoken of "international division of labour"; now we can change this into "international division of crime". Each one of the three areas that have a different level of development can assume in this context a precise role.
a. Some structural data
It's not my task to define the development trends of this "international division of crime", neither do I have the technical instruments to do so, but this overall vision of the problem allows the introduction of some illustrative data on the present situation that, at least to a certain extent, can give an idea of the characteristics of international economy. They refer to the beginning of the 1990s and present complex problems of monetary conversion.
The richer countries have a pro-capita income between $20,000 and $30,000 per year, and the poorer ones less than $100 per year. Countries which are important and populated like Turkey (60 million inhabitants) have a pro-capita income of less than $2,000 per year, and therefore a Gross National Product (which under certain respects can be assimilated to a business's turnover) of under $120 billion a year.
To make a comparison, Luxembourg with fewer than 400,000 inhabitants has a G.N.P. which is a bit less than a tenth of Turkey's, and Italy which has an analogous population to Turkey, has a G.N.P. which is ten times higher.
The Gross National Product of many of the poorest African countries with densely populated (10 or more millions) is lower than $1 billion.
The larger and more industrialised nations have commercial flows in credits and liabilities often higher that the G.N.P. of other nations of average dimensions: for example, the American, Japanese, and German import-export businesses amounts to around $4 or $500 billion a year, a figure which represents Turkey's G.N.P.
b. The large enterprises
To be able to appreciate this data it would be interesting to compare it with the major manufacturing enterprises; a confrontation with the large international financing companies (with even more dazzling results) could be possible, but their particular characteristics render the analysis very complex.
The major enterprises have dimensions (from every point of view) which can be compared to those of countries which have an average level of development and of population. Turkey's G.N.P., $120 billion, is lower than General Motors' turnover, the world's top manufacturer, and it is substantially similar to Ford's one, which the second largest manufacturer in the world.
The sales of Daimler Benz, which is the 10th manufacturing group in the world, is five or six times Luxembourg's G.N.P. and a little lower than Greece's, a country within the European Union with 10 million inhabitants.
These few and approximate figures give a sufficiently precise if superficial idea, not only of the diversity in individual and national levels of income from country to country, but even and above all, of the characters of the world's economy and the power balance between nations and the largest companies.
It is within the nature of these large multinationals to operate according to a "global" perspective, within a "global" economy.
This means that they diversify the locations of their legal, administrative, financial, productive sites..... distributing them among countries where this is more advantageous for them, both with respect to their general objectives and to single operative needs (from which comes the concept of "international division of labour").
If these objectives are coherent with the more general economic rules, there are no difficulties but, it is evident that the fragmentation of operations makes an external reconstruction of logic of behaviours very difficult.
When there exists a wide-spread managerial inability or instead, even worse, bad faith, this behavioural freedom of businesses can create enormous costs for the international community, to individuals or to other companies, as it was recently demonstrated by the financial disadventures of one of the major financial institutions in Britain which chose to operate in two countries which have or had applied laxed financial controls.
c. Criminal trusts
The relative figures of the criminal business are enormous, especially if evaluated in terms of "overall economic costs" but this is hard to quantify. The Italian criminal bill is estimated between 10 to 15% of the nation's Gross National Product, that is between 150 and 200 billion dollars per year; in this figure every type of activity is included, from thefts to drug-trafficking, from money-lending, to illegal waste disposal with the connected costs for prevention.
The total amount of the world's drug traffic is estimated to be 500 billion dollars, only a part of which can be traced back to the export from the productive countries: in the case of Colombia this value would be 2 or 3 billion dollars a years.
It is much harder to estimate the criminal "billing" not by sectors, (drugs, prostitution, extortions, etc.) but by "business". As in the industrial multinationals, organised crime tends in fact to grow in its business dimensions, to operate in different nations and to differentiate its activities covering all productive sectors be they legitimate or illegitimate.
The Italian American Mafia or the Japanese Yakuza are crystal clear examples of this evolution and they generate business (or economic damages) that can be evaluated in tens of billions of dollars each year.
Some may judge these figures as hyperbolic and well beyond the criminal phenomenon and they justify their conviction with the observation that there could exist a wide-spread interest to shock the public opinion; this could be true but their dimension, even if cut by half, still remains such as to justify the observations which follow.
The first is that these figures are comparable with the Gross National Products or to the commercial flows of some nations or to the turnover of large international enterprises.

The second which comes down from what we have just said is that the criminal trusts resemble the large businesses more and more and therefore act according to the logic of multi-national companies, that is, they place their activities in different nations according to "global" strategies and to the principle of the "international division of labour".
A consequence of all this is that it is becoming easier and easier for criminal trusts to be able to control large businesses or nations even of average dimensions that have already reached a certain level of development.

2. Institutions and rules for the economy
The conclusion of all this reasoning is that we need rules for and within the economy. They must still be, for the most part, codified, but it is already clear that they should rely on national and international institutions closely interrelated and able to gather and exchange information and perform effective actions, each one of them according to its own competence.
a. A historical retrospect
The problem regulating the economy is quite old, for example already around the 2,000 B.C. the Assyro-Babylonians had tried to impose authoritative mechanisms of price control.
This experience was attempted several times in the following centuries but always with disastrous results. In 313 B.C. for example, the Edict of Diocletian tried, with scarce results, to regulate prices and tariffs of the majority of goods and services both in the East and West of the Roman Empire.
Other attempts were made up to the recent 1970s when, following the first oil shock, many Western countries passed precise regulations for the prices.
The results of 4,000 years of trying to control the prices have been disastrous because these are practises which contrast with economy's own nature, and because the system of gathering and managing information has always been inefficient, and finally because the institutions appointed to this task have not acted effectively.
The systems for controlling prices administratively have, thus, always created large tax-evasion, but also speculation, the cornering of markets, unlawful acquisition of wealth, and serious exploitation of weaker people.
b. Which rules and which institutions
This historical example allows us to get to the core of my reflection which is that there is a need for coherent rules, managed by institutions able to use every bit of necessary information and of making, quickly and clearly, all consequent decisions; these decisions must then be respected.
Only with these rules can functional answers be given to the needs which arise from the development of crime which is always tied to the economy it has used as a means and as an end.
Rules and institutions must, therefore, be able to operate in such a manner as to be able to favour the correct functioning of economy and be applicable to nations, businesses, and even to individuals at least as far as their economic behaviour is concerned.
These rules can be valuable both internally and externally. In the first case the rules must be codified and all information which allows to verify the assets and the commercial and financial flows of nations and businesses (for example the social, proprietary, financial and commercial records) must be made available.
In the case of external rules, the possibility of creating a set of behavioural norms to which nations and businesses must attain to in comparison to other nations and businesses. As a whole, the laws are to be broadened, for example, the norms regarding international trade, on transfers of capital, on the protection of competition, or on fiscal behaviour.
The existence of institutions especially appointed to safeguard the rules complete this picture; as with the rules, even the institutions can be either national or supra-national.
c. An example: protection of competition
The rules and institutions which already exist and are tasked with the protection of competition are an example of how it is possible to create a system that, even having its own objectives, can also be used in the fight against crime.
The first applications of these regulations can be traced back to more than a century ago, when in the U.S. the problem of bridging up between the large economic power and the respect of human rights, between the abuse of market power by large commercial and petroleum trusts and the survival of democracy was firstly felt.
Therefore, precise rules against agreements contrary to competition and abuse of dominant positions were passed. Specific institutions (both administrative and judicial) tasked with applying them were created.
A century later , not all the results which were hoped for at the time have been achieved, nonetheless, this useful plan of reference has become a universal patrimony. First England, then the European Community, and then all the other industrialised nations have given themselves rules and institutions vested with the protection of competition: among the last ones, and very recently (in 1990) even Italy.
Even the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, which have only recently modified their institutional order coming out of state economy have decided to adopt similar rules. However, and I shall only mention it briefly because it is external to the issue I am speaking about, internal difficulties do not allow easy, determined and accurate application.
A formidable obstacle to real integration of economies is the existence of rules and institutions which protect only national competition, they are not co-ordinated and sometimes they are even jealous of their own prerogatives.
This has not been overcome yet. The first steps have been taken within the European Union as national regulations are slowly but continuously adjusting to this new need.
In this respect Italy being among the last ones has at least had the merit of adopting in a short time regulations coherent with European requirements.
It is a very complex problem, so much so that there have been negotiations, just concluded, between the European Union and the U.S. to find coherent patterns of reciprocal behaviour in the policies for the protection of the competition. At the same time, the U.S. are threatening to apply their own regulations even to non U.S. enterprises violating them even out of the federal territory.
The most recent step forward towards a greater order in international trade and in the behaviour of companies is represented by the recent and definitive signing of the treaty establishing the World Trade Organisation, heir to the provisional GATT (so temporary that it took 40 years to put it aside).
At the same time, the competition issue is being discussed within other international bodies, for example some special U.N. Agencies, Central Banks and their co-ordinating bodies and within the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
All these bodies, verifying and gathering information on legal behaviours, will obviously point out also illegal behaviours.

Conclusions
The globalization of economy and the globalization of crime require more coherent rules and behaviours.
This makes the creation of rules and institutions at a national and international level necessary. They should respect the specific competences but should at the same time be able to interact effectively especially in order to gather and exchange information.
These institutions must naturally be very respectful of the roles and of the competences, but not to the point of preventing effective and transparent actions be enforced.
I shall end recalling the concept of transparency because in Democracy it represents the most important guarantee.