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R.T. Naylor

  • Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers and Copycats are Hijacking the Global Economy by Moisés Naím  Buy this book

Moisés Naím identifies a new connection between world economics and world politics: ‘Global criminal activities are transforming the international system.’ This transformation, he argues, requires a wholly new response: biometrics and other new technologies are needed to track perpetrators; fancier security devices will be needed to detect fakes and copies; and governments will have to make bureaucracies more flexible. These, you could say, are alarming developments, and Naím should be congratulated for bringing them so forcibly to public attention. The only problem is to find evidence that any of them is actually true.

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R.T. Naylor is a professor of economics at McGill University in Montreal. His books include Hot Money and the Politics of Debt, Wages of Crime, and most recently, Satanic Purses: Money, Myth and Misinformation in the War on Terror.