Search

In times of pandemics or natural catastrophes, prices of commodities, such as water, food and medicines, tend to shoot up, in response to a surge in demand and depleting supplies. The government, in its misguided efforts to maintain “price affordability”, imposes price controls and anti-price-gouging legislation and bans the reselling of food and medical supplies. These interventions in the free market are the exact opposite of what the government should do, if it wants to ensure that enough commodities go to people who need them, that people do not hoard all available goods on grocery shelves, and most importantly, that suppliers have the incentive to produce more goods to meet current and future demand at market prices.

Svjetska mreža, World Wide Web, dijeli se na površinsku mrežu, duboku mrežu i mračnu mrežu. Sadržaj površinske mreže dostupan je pretraživanjem putem tražilica kao što su to Google i Bing koje prikazuju indeksirani sadržaj. Duboka mreža obuhvaća onaj sadržaj koji mrežne tražilice nisu indeksirale. Ne postoji točna informacija o veličini duboke mreže, no smatra se da je ona 4 do 5 tisuća puta veća od površinskog Weba. Mračna mreža je dio duboke mreže, a pristup joj je moguć isključivo putem mračnog interneta korištenjem određenih alata i programa. Najpoznatiji takav servis je Tor koji jamči tajnost identiteta prilikom korištenja Tor preglednika. Zbog razine anonimnosti koju pruža, mračna mreža je leglo ilegalnih i kriminalnih radnji. Najposjećenija mjesta mračne mreže su crna tržišta koja na raspolaganje stavljaju ponajviše narkotike i oružja. Transakcije se na tržištima vrše u kriptovalutama, a najčešće korištena je kriptovaluta Bitcoin. The World Wide Web is divided into the Surface Web, Deep Web and the Dark Web. The contents of the Surface web are available through the use of search engines such as Google and Bing, which show indexed content. The Deep Web shows the content which the search engines have not indexed.Information about the actual size of the Deep Web does not exist, but it is believed that its size is about 4-5 thousand times bigger than the Surface Web. The Dark Web is a part of the Deep Web, which is only accessible through the darknets with the use of special tools and applications. The most well known service is Tor which guarantees anonymity while using the Tor browser. Because of its level of anonymity, the Dark Web is full of illegal actions and crime. The most visited sites on the Dark Web are Black markets which offer a variety of narcotics and weapons. Transactions made on the Dark Web are being done with cryptocurrencies, most commonly Bitcoin.

Cybercrime activities are supported by infrastructures and services originating from an underground economy. The current understanding of this phenomenon is that the cybercrime economy ought to be fraught with information asymmetry and adverse selection problems. They should make the effects that we observe every day impossible to sustain. In this paper, we show that the market structure and design used by cyber criminals have evolved toward a market design that is similar to legitimate, thriving, online forum markets such as eBay. We illustrate this evolution by comparing the market regulatory mechanisms of two underground forum markets: 1) a failed market for credit cards and other illegal goods and 2) another, extremely active marketplace for vulnerabilities, exploits, and cyber attacks in general. The comparison shows that cybercrime markets evolved from unruly, scam for scammers market mechanisms to mature, regulated mechanisms that greatly favors trade efficiency.

This paper studies the regulation of markets where legal products compete against illegal substitutes, such as weapons, cigarettes, transplantation organs, and shadow banking. Our focus is on the impacts of regulatory measures affecting asymmetrically the legal and the illegal segments of the market on competition patterns, market outcomes and welfare. We present a game-theoretical model to endogenize companies’ decision between going legal or illegal. Such decision is associated with different costs, but also with a different type of competition in the market place: horizontal product differentiation if all firms are legal and tightly regulated, or vertical differentiation if not. Regulation may backfire if the black market is not considered. More stringent regulation – which only impacts the legal segment – fosters the incentives for going illegal whenever the new regulatory measure increases the costs of legal entry. Regulation in such a context leads to lower average product quality and consumer welfare.

The Title of the First Version: On large-scale money finance in the presence of black markets: the case of the Japanese economy during and after World War II, First Version: January 2017, This Version: August 2017

Dieser Artikel dokumentiert ein Interview zur Drogenpolitik. Erläutert werden die innen- und außenpolitischen Folgen der Prohibitionspolitik. Im Zentrum steht das Argument, dass Schwarzmärkte keinen Verbraucherschutz gewährleisten. This article documents an interview on the politics of drug prohibition. It explains the consequences of prohibiting drugs both for internal and external politics. The crucial argument is that black markets do not provide consumer protection.

A proposal for addressing rhinoceros poaching is to legalise the trade in rhino horn and adopt a regulated market approach (RMA), overturning the current trade ban. This orthodox economic prescription aims to reduce incentives to poach endangered wildlife by driving down the market price of their products via auctioned stockpile releases. Biologists are clear, however, that securing a stockpile for some species needs biological success in captive breeding programmes (CBPs) which varies markedly across species and habitats. Rhinoceros herds in a CBP would need spatially extensive terrain and costly permanent security measures, and this only appears feasible for the less aggressive “white” rhino. We argue that market price would actually need to be sustained at a high level to cover protection costs over the longer reproduction cycles in CBPs and that, without extensive monitoring and the correct institutional structures being in place, legalising trade may encourage, rather than prevent, poaching. Supplementary policy measures that differentiate among consumer groups would also likely prove necessary.

Internet es una herramienta indispensable en la sociedad actual, estando presente en todas las facetas de nuestras vidas. Lo que ha supuesto, sin duda, un gran avance con innumerables ventajas tiene su reverso en el uso que del mismo da el terrorismo. La deep web, como parte de la red, supone un entorno privilegiado para sus fines ya que su propia estructura y filosofía está concebida para garantizar el anonimato de sus usuarios. Ante esa premisa, las organizaciones criminales y terroristas han hecho de ella un lugar de encuentro, donde poder comunicarse y actuar con seguridad y, al amparo de las condiciones de anonimato, han florecido mercados en los que es posible comprar, prácticamente, cualquier producto considerado ilegal. Para el éxito de estos mercados, y dada la trazabilidad de los medios de pago existentes por parte de las agencias y fuerzas policiales, surgieron las monedas virtuales, y más en concreto el Bitcoin, como piedra angular de los mismos, haciendo devenir en insuficientes las normativas nacionales sobre control de la financiación del terrorismo, de prevención del blanqueo y control de flujos entre países. La deep web y las monedas virtuales suponen, a la vez, una amenaza y un reto al que los países tienen que dar solución con urgencia.

Presence of black markets is not common for every industry but is a unique phenomenon in the industries such as asset pooling and leasing services. The unique business models and the asset flows that we see in such industries are susceptible for such threats and reveals the nature and extent of extent of industry-specific threats. This paper employs agility lens (Overby et al. 2006; Roberts and Grover 2012) to understand how such firms could address the issue of black market threats with the help of network structure. Through a case study of a global asset pooling and leasing company, we reveal the criticality of network structures, the difficulties, inadequacies and impracticalities of current tracking technologies that challenge firms in minimizing such threats.

Like many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, Senegal has struggled to develop its industrial sector in the face of import competition. For basic food products, there is an implicit trade-off between the objectives of maintaining employment and lowering the cost of living, both of which figure prominently in current government policy. Conflicting pressures have led to a rather inconsistent policy mix of high levels of protection with price ceilings. The products of the three industries examined here—sugar, vegetable oil, and flour—account for roughly 14 percent of the consumption basket of the poor, so distortions in their prices can have a significant effect on poverty reduction. This paper compares domestic prices in Senegal with world prices since 2000, and then explains the difference by examining the protection enjoyed by these industries, along with their market structure. The analysis finds that high protection and market power have resulted in domestic prices which were often two or three times the equivalent world price. Tightening of price ceilings and some liberalization have taken place recently, but consumers have continued to pay above world prices for sugar and edible oil in 2014. The paper estimates that if this differential were eliminated, the purchasing power of households around the poverty line would increase by 3 percent, 227,000 people would move above the poverty line, and the national poverty rate would drop by 1.9 percentage points. The cost to consumers far exceeds the total wage bill paid by these industries. Further liberalization of these industries is recommended, along with phasing out price controls and shifting government policy from protecting traditional enterprises to the promotion of new export-oriented ones.

Cybercrime is notoriously maintained and empowered by the underground economy, manifested in black markets. In such markets, attack tools and vulnerability exploits are constantly traded. In this paper, we focus on making a quantitative assessment of the risk of attacks coming from such markets, and investigating the expected reduction in overall attacks against final users if, for example, vulnerabilities traded in the black markets were all to be promptly patched. In order to conduct the analysis, we mainly use the data on (a) vulnerabilities bundled in 90+ attack tools traded in the black markets collected by us; (b) actual records of 9 × 107 attacks collected from Symantec's Data Sharing Programme WINE. Our results illustrate that black market vulnerabilities are an important source of risk for the population of users; we further show that vulnerability mitigation strategies based on black markets monitoring may outperform traditional strategies based on vulnerability CVSS scores by providing up to 20% more expected reduction in attacks.

This paper explores how the private sector can positively contribute to peace-building and conflict prevention, and how that positive private sector role can be supported and enhanced. The starting premise recognizes that the private sector exists in all conflict situations and has the potential to both exacerbate and ameliorate conflict, the outcome of which can be greatly affected by appropriate support from external partners. It also posits that a thriving, legal, private sector is essential to development and peace, as it provides livelihoods and growth, while delivering revenue streams in the form of taxes so governments can provide services to their citizens. It also posits that a thriving, legal, private sector is essential to development and peace, as it provides livelihoods and growth, while delivering revenue streams in the form of taxes so governments can provide services to their citizens. This paper discusses and analyzes the role of the private sector in fragile and conflict-affected states, beginning with its role in the conflicts themselves, and in the immediate peace-building and longer-term reconstruction and development phases. The paper acknowledges that the topic of private sector development cuts across political, governance, and security dimensions, as well as a broad range of development themes. It also considers international efforts to support the private sector in fragile and conflict affected settings to date, identifying gaps and making recommendations to address them. The paper does not focus on detailed operational issues or the use of various reform tools.

The paper focuses its analysis on the last three decades of the twentieth century. The basic assumption is that Egypt's economic performance during this period was less than satisfactory compared with the most successful examples in the far East and elsewhere. The paper also assumes that Egypt's initial conditions at midcentury compared favorably with the winners in the development race at the end of the century. Egypt has achieved positive progress, no doubt, yet compared with the higher performers in Asia, and given its favorable good initial conditions, the record seems quite mediocre. By mid-twentieth century, Egypt's agriculture had almost reached its limits. Egypt, therefore, faced a new challenge: a need to transform itself into an industrial society. This objective was only partially achieved. The paper identifies three interrelated factors that helped hinder Egypt's accession to a new industrial society. The first factor is a strong state and a weak society. An authoritarian state that in its endeavor to preserve its prerogatives had to give up good governance practices and limit the creative initiative of the individuals. The second factor is a semi-rentier economy. The availability of windfall revenues not only reduced the pressure for change but also promoted a new rentier mentality that undermined the emergence of an industrial spirit. The third factor is an inadequate education system. This system failed to provide the proper skills and values required for the industrial society. These factors, moreover, are interdependent and reinforce each other.

Economic models of trade in endangered species products often do not incorporate four focal arguments in the policy debate over trade bans: (1) law-abiding consumers may operate in another market, separate from illegal consumers, that trade would bring online; (2) legal trade reduces stigma, which affects demand of law-abiding consumers; (3) laundering may bring illegal goods to legal markets when trade is allowed; (4) legal sales may affect illegal supply costs. This paper analyzes systematically which aspects of these complicated markets, separately or in combination, are important for determining whether limited legalized trade in otherwise illegal goods can be helpful for achieving policy goals like reducing poaching.