The British Statistical Office estimated that fraud accounted for maybe 11 billion British pounds of foreign trade and up to 0.2 percent of GDP. See: http://www.statistics.gov.uk/articles/economic_trends/ETAug03Ruffles.pdf
In the industrialised countries, annual crime victim rates are from one in three victims to one in six victims. In Eastern Europe, the incidence of car theft is especially high. In the Third World, one in five people annually are said to be victims of corruption, and the other big sources of crime are consumer fraud and thefts from cars. For some fraud statistics, see http://www.epaynews.com/statistics/fraud.html Anti-corruption information at http://www.nobribes.org/ and www.transparency.org . Transparency International has branches in several countries. For the Global Corruption Report 2003, see http://www.globalcorruptionreport.org/download.shtml For statistics on world crime, see http://www.uncjin.org/Statistics/statistics.html and http://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/crime_cicp_surveys.html A table showing total recorded crime per 100,000 inhabitants per country is shown at http://www.unodc.org/pdf/crime/sixthsurvey/TotalRecordedCrime.pdf The UN anti-corruption treaty text, adopted by consensus but yet to be ratified, spells out measures to prevent corruption in the public and private sectors and requires governments to cooperate in the investigations and prosecutions of offenders. It establishes a commitment to criminalize bribery, embezzlement, and money laundering, and requires that governments take action in a number of areas - for example in public procurement, public financial management, and in regulating their public officials. Politicians and political parties must declare openly how they finance their election campaigns, and countries must return assets obtained through corruption to the country from where they were stolen. "Private-sector bribery is not a crime in the United States. We get at it in other ways," said a U.S. official. "This is an area quite distant from determining what is proper conduct in the public sector. It would be intruding into purely private-sector conduct." But Jeremy Pope, executive director of Berlin-based Transparency International, argues that business corruption "undermines public confidence in the private sector and can have serious economic and political consequences." Source: http://forums.transnationale.org/viewtopic.php?t=1056&view=next The new Treaty text complements another landmark treaty, the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime, which entered into force Sept. 29 and requires ratifying countries to cooperate with each other in combatting money laundering, organized crime and human trafficking. According to a 1998 UN declaration, corruption & bribery was defined as "a) The offer, promise or giving of any payment, gift or other advantage, directly or indirectly, by any private or public corporation, including a transnational corporation, or individual from a State to any public official or elected representative of another country as undue consideration for performing or refraining from the performance of that official's or representative's duties in connection with an international commercial transaction; (b) The soliciting, demanding, accepting or receiving, directly or indirectly, by any public official or elected representative of a State from any private or public corporation, including a transnational corporation, or individual from another country of any payment, gift or other advantage, as undue consideration for performing or refraining from the performance of that official's or representative's duties in connection with an international commercial transaction." The World Bank claims corruption is "the single greatest obstacle to economic and social development. It undermines development by distorting the rule of law and weakening the institutional foundation on which economic growth depends. The harmful effects of corruption are especially severe on the poor, who are hardest hit by economic decline, are most reliant on the provision of public services, and are least capable of paying the extra costs associated with bribery, fraud, and the misappropriation of economic privileges. Corruption sabotages policies and programs that aim to reduce poverty, so attacking corruption is critical to the achievement of the Bank's overarching mission of poverty reduction." The World Bank's proposed strategy has the following elements:1. Increasing Political Accountability 2. Strengthening Civil Society Participation 3. Creating a Competitive Private Sector 4. Institutional Restraints on Power 5. Improving Public Sector Management. Jurriaan
