Overview

Most of the economists who involve themselves in the analysis of the activities of criminal organisations are led by a concern for what newspapers report about their continuous violations of the basic norms which have come to rule social life. However, such an interest also comes from the belief that some conceptual tools, theoretical results and empirical facts obtained by economists working on other issues can be put to work to reach a better understanding of their origins and activities.

Further, since economists as such hold no comparative advantage in the area of ethical reflection with respect to other scholars such as moral philosophers or theologians, the economists’ most valuable contribution, at least because relatively scarce, should come from a positive analysis of the workings of criminal organisations, of their internal structure and of the constraints limiting their activities, with special reference to the constraints posed by the legal government. In this respect, we will show that economists interested in policy-making at large may also have something to learn from a closer analysis of how illegal markets and activities constrain the activities of a policy-maker when the latter intervenes on legal markets.

Even if economists may have some comparative advantage in the analysis of organised crime, they have done relatively little work in the area. This even if it is more than twenty years since ‘crime and economics’ became an established and autonomous area of research. However, most of the work following the contribution of Becker (1968) has been targeted on individual agents’ allocative choice between legal and illegal activities in the face of different deterrence systems and different opportunity costs.