Brigitte Unger - Böcker

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.Combating Fiscal Fraud and Empowering Regulators analyzes the impact of new international tax regulations on the scope and scale of tax evasion, tax avoidance, and money laundering. These are analyzed through an ecosystem framework in which, similar to a natural ecosystem, new tax regulations appear as heavy shocks to the tax ecosystem, to which the 'species' such as countries, corporations, and tax experts will react by looking for new loopholes and niches of survival. By analyzing the impact of tax reforms from different perspectives--a legal, political science, accounting, and economic one--one may derive an assessment of the reforms and policy recommendations for an improved international tax system.The ultimate goal is to combat fiscal fraud and empower regulators, in that line, this volume is intended for a broad audience that seeks to know more about the latest state of the art in the realm of taxation from a multidisciplinary perspective. The money involved amounts to billions in unpaid taxes that could be better used for stopping hunger, guaranteeing education, and safeguarding biodiversity, hence making this world a better one. Regulators can see this book as a guiding light of what has happened in the past forty years, and how the world has and will continue to change as a result of it. Combating Fiscal Fraud and Empowering Regulators is also a warning about new emerging tax loopholes, such as freeports or golden passports and visas, where residency can be bought in tax havens, even within the European Union. The main message is that inequality can and has to be reduced substantially and that this can be achieved through a well-working international tax system that eliminates secrecy, opaqueness, and tax havens.

Although the practice of disguising the illicit origins of money dates back thousands of years, the concept of money laundering as a multidisciplinary topic with social, economic, political and regulatory implications has only gained prominence since the 1980s. This groundbreaking volume offers original, state-of-the-art research on the current money laundering debate and provides insightful predictions and recommendations for future developments in the field.The contributors to this volume - academics, practitioners and government representatives from around the world - offer a number of unique perspectives on different aspects of money laundering. Topics discussed include the history of money laundering, the scale of the problem, the different types of money laundering, the cost to the private sector, and the effectiveness of anti-money laundering policies and legislation. The book concludes with a detailed and insightful synthesis of the problem and recommendations for additional steps to be taken in the future.Students, professors and practitioners working in economics, banking, finance and law will find this volume a comprehensive and invaluable resource.Contributors: H. Addink, A. Argentiero, M. Bagella, R.W. Baker, J. Biggins, J. Brettl, A. Buehn, F. Busato, P. Costanzo, S. Dawe, I. Deleanu, J. Ferwerda, L. Groot, T. Krieger, M. Levi, D. Masciandaro, K.J. McCarthy, D. Meierrieks, B. Mühl, E. Nowotny, T. Pietschmann, P. Reuter, F. Schneider, M. Stouten, A. Tilleman, L. Tromp, B. Unger, M. van den Broek, D. van der Linde, P.C. van Duyne, V. van Kommer, J. van Koningsveld, I. van Rossum, F. van Waarden, J. Vervaele, B. Vettori, J. Walker, M. von und zu Liechtenstein, J.S. Zdanowicz

Although the practice of disguising the illicit origins of money dates back thousands of years, the concept of money laundering as a multidisciplinary topic with social, economic, political and regulatory implications has only gained prominence since the 1980s. This groundbreaking volume offers original, state-of-the-art research on the current money laundering debate and provides insightful predictions and recommendations for future developments in the field.The contributors to this volume - academics, practitioners and government representatives from around the world - offer a number of unique perspectives on different aspects of money laundering. Topics discussed include the history of money laundering, the scale of the problem, the different types of money laundering, the cost to the private sector, and the effectiveness of anti-money laundering policies and legislation. The book concludes with a detailed and insightful synthesis of the problem and recommendations for additional steps to be taken in the future.Students, professors and practitioners working in economics, banking, finance and law will find this volume a comprehensive and invaluable resource.Contributors: H. Addink, A. Argentiero, M. Bagella, R.W. Baker, J. Biggins, J. Brettl, A. Buehn, F. Busato, P. Costanzo, S. Dawe, I. Deleanu, J. Ferwerda, L. Groot, T. Krieger, M. Levi, D. Masciandaro, K.J. McCarthy, D. Meierrieks, B. Mühl, E. Nowotny, T. Pietschmann, P. Reuter, F. Schneider, M. Stouten, A. Tilleman, L. Tromp, B. Unger, M. van den Broek, D. van der Linde, P.C. van Duyne, V. van Kommer, J. van Koningsveld, I. van Rossum, F. van Waarden, J. Vervaele, B. Vettori, J. Walker, M. von und zu Liechtenstein, J.S. Zdanowicz

Official government policies against money laundering in the EU have been in place for roughly 25 years, after much concerted effort and a great deal of time and money invested. This volume examines the anti-money laundering policy of the EU Member States in connection to the threat of money laundering they face. During a three-year study the authors analyzed the policies in-depth by traveling to 27 Member States to interview over a hundred people involved in the fight against money laundering. The analysis includes an inquiry into the national supervisory architectures, a comparison of the definitions of money laundering used in practice, a breakdown of the role of Financial Intelligence Units and a cost-benefit analysis of anti-money laundering policy.Skillfully assessing the economic and legal effectiveness of anti-money laundering efforts in the EU, this comprehensive study will appeal to students, scholars and practitioners working in economics, banking, finance and law.Contents: 1. Introduction and Operationalization 2. Threat of Money Laundering 3. Harmonization of Substantive Norms in Preventative AML 4. Implementing International Conventions and the Third EU Directive 5. Supervisory Architectures in the Preventive AML Policy 6. Definitions of Money Laundering in Practice 7. FIU's in the European Union - Facts and Figures, Functions and Facilities 8. Information Flows and Repressive Enforcement 9. International Cooperation 10. Collection of Statistics 11. Effectiveness: Threat and Corresponding Policy Response 12. Cost Benefit Analysis 13. Summary and Conclusions

Legitimized by the arguments of efficiency gains, public housing, pensions, unemployment insurance and health care are all being gradually privatized. In many countries, even the state's 'night-watchmen' role of providing security is offered by private prisons and security guards. In the face of these and other developments, this book argues that on the basis of efficiency, morality and equality there is still an overwhelming need for public intervention - the res publica.Public or Private Goods? brings together leading scholars from various disciplines including economics, sociology, political science, geography and spatial planning. The book explores core public tasks that the state has traditionally provided but which are increasingly privatized and subsumed into the private sector. For example, although the state still funds and regulates core domains, it provides fewer and fewer visible goods. The authors show how this apparent invisibility of the state presents serious challenges for both income equality and democracy. This thoughtful interdisciplinary book will appeal to advanced students and academics in political science, public sector economics and public finance. It will also provide stimulating reading for politicians, policymakers and anyone interested in the provision of public services.Contributors include: F. Blank, G. Bonvissuto, J. Ferwerda, M. Getzner, G. Gutheil-Knopp-Kirchwald, J. Kadi, T. Knijn, I. Koetsier, J. Lewis, B. Unger, D. van der Linde, K. van Egmond, F. van Waarden

The recent dramatic wave of terrorist attacks has further focussed worldwide attention on the money laundering phenomena. The objective of this book is to offer the first systematic analysis of the economics of money laundering and its connection with terrorism finance. The authors first present the general principles of money laundering. They go on to illustrate an institutional and empirical framework that is useful in evaluating the causes and effects of money laundering phenomena in the banking and financial markets. They also analyse the design of the national and international policies aimed at combating them.The book focuses on several crucial issues and offers an analysis of each, including:modelling the behaviour and process of making dirty money appear clean, hiding the originally criminal or illegal source of the economic activitydemonstrating how the financing of terrorism resembles money laundering in some respects and differs from it in othersexplaining how the banking and financial industry can play a pivotal role for the development of the criminal sector as a preferential vehicle for money launderingshowing how schemes of international economics and of tax competition can be applied to black finance issues, claiming that competition for criminal money can lead to a race to the bottombuilding up indicators of money laundering attractiveness among developed and emerging countries, with a particular attention on the role of the Offshore centresdealing with anti-money laundering and counter terrorism finance (AML-CTF) enforcement problems, with a focus on Europe and the USA.Black Finance will be a valuable and accessible tool for scholars and academics, principally in economics, though also in politics and law, as well as for regulators and supervisory institutions.All royalties from this book to go to The Collegiate Foundation for Life

Money laundering is a problem of some magnitude internationally and has long term negative economic impacts. Brigitte Unger argues that today, money laundering is largely linked to fraud and that it is not only small islands and tax havens which launder, but increasingly, industrialized countries like the US, Australia, The Netherlands and the UK. Well established financial markets and growing economies with sound political and social structures attract launderers in the same way as they attract honest capital.The book gives an interdisciplinary overview of the state-of-the-art of money laundering as well as describing the legal problems of defining and fighting money laundering. It then goes on to present a number of economic models designed to measure money laundering and applies these to measuring the size of laundering in The Netherlands and Australia. The book also gives an overview of techniques and potential effects of money laundering identified and measured so far in the literature. It adds to this debate by calculating the effects of laundering on crime and economic growth.This book will be of great interest to lawyers, financial experts, economists, political scientists, as well as to government ministries, international and national organizations and central banks.

In many countries, the real estate sector is vulnerable to money laundering due to a high number of factors including; the high value of assets, price fluctuations and speculation within the market, difficulties in assessing the true value of a house, and the fact that the legal owner is not necessarily the economic owner. In this book, the authors identify a total of 25 characteristics which render a property susceptible to money laundering. The more such characteristics a property exhibits, the more suspicious it becomes. The authors also discover that some of these characteristics weigh heavier than others. Combining economic, econometric and criminological analysis, this multidisciplinary approach shows how to detect criminal investment in the real estate sector. This well-researched book will appeal to government authorities responsible for combating money laundering, international organizations such as the IMF, the UN, the Worldbank and the EU, as well as financial intelligence units in all countries. Real estate associations, real estate research centers, criminologists and economists will also find this book invaluable.