2009 State of the Future

2009 State of the Future by Jerome C. Glenn, Theodore J. Gordon, and Elizabeth Florescu

Excerpt from the Executive Summary:

"Illicit trade is estimated to be over $1 trillion per year. McAfee puts cybercrime at $105 billion. These figures do not include extortion or organized crime’s part of the $1 trillion in bribes that the World Bank estimates are paid annually or its part of the estimated $1.5–6.5 trillion annually in laundered money. Hence the total income could be well over $2 trillion—about twice all the military budgets in the world. Governments can be understood as a series of decision points, with some people in those points vulnerable to very large bribes. Decisions could be bought and sold like heroin, making democracy an illusion. Organized crime continues to grow in the absence of a comprehensive, integrated global counter-strategy. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime says, “The links between drug trafficking and other forms of transnational organized crime call for a more integrated approach to address this nexus.”"