Abstract
The purpose of this chapter is to study the detailed dynamics of economic and financial crimes within the European Union member states, namely corruption, shadow economy, tax evasion, money laundering, cybercrime and financial frauds. Our econometric modelling focuses on the impact of the vector of financial and economic crime proxies upon economic prosperity and human development. In accordance to the reviewed literature, for our sample of European Union countries, corruption and shadow economy have a negative effect upon the vector of development proxies while money laundering and cybercrimes belonging to “white collars” are positively correlated with the vector of development proxies that we analyze. All the data are interpreted and discussed, and then conclusions are drawn. Governmental policies on economic prosperity and societal wellbeing should focus on reducing corruption and shadow economy, in order to favour benefits in the field of economic and human development.
Highlights
At the international level, there is not any common definition valid for all the states regarding the economic and financial crime phenomena but in practice, this concept is associated with various deeds such as corruption, tax evasion, money laundering, theft cheating, embezzlement, data distortion, counterfeiting, data and document cover up and destruction, tax evasion, crimes regarding the accounting books and many others.The growing digital economy together with the period of crisis create challenges for the criminals to find new channels to engage in crimes
This study brings a detailed insight on the evolution of the dimensions of the financial and economic crimes, with an explanatory approach of the top of frauds, corruption, shadow economy, money laundering, tax evasion with an emphasis on value added tax (VAT) lost revenues, cybercrimes as reflected by the Global Cybersecurity Index, malware and data breaches and card fraud losses, closely related to the specialised literature in this field
Our empirical analyses cover the EU member states and throughout the time frame of the last 15 years, the impact of the vector of financial and economic crime proxies upon the economic development measured as per capita Gross Domestic Product per capita (GDP) has proved to be stronger than their impact upon Human Development Index (HDI) as a proxy of sustainable human development
Summary
There is not any common definition valid for all the states regarding the economic and financial crime phenomena but in practice, this concept is associated with various deeds such as corruption, tax evasion, money laundering, theft cheating, embezzlement, data distortion, counterfeiting, data and document cover up and destruction, tax evasion, crimes regarding the accounting books and many others. On March 2020 the number of cybercrime events increased about 1.5 times compared to the similar month of 2018 [2] Under these conditions, the theft of banking data, followed by the compromise of savings accounts, frauds on some institutions and Improving Quality of Life - Exploring Standard of Living, Wellbeing, and Community Development companies or blocking access to information systems, increased the pressure on society. An important role in the fight against money laundering is played by international money laundering regulations which have known important adjustments year by year especially starting with the fifth EU Directive (EU) 2018/843 [4] which brings many important adjustments including addressing the risks associated with prepaid cards and virtual currencies All these crimes bring along many negative effects upon people on many channels: the decrease of the revenues collected by the national budgets [5, 6]; the diminishing of the level of economic and sustainable development [7–11]; the reduction of the level of investments The paper ends with the formulation of the final conclusions, limits and future studies
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