In The Economics of Crime, Vifran Meza offers a profound, current, and rigorous reading of the contemporary criminal phenomenon from an economic, institutional, and strategic perspective. The work transcends the traditional criminal-law view in order to examine crime as a system for generating rents, organizing illicit markets, producing operational innovation, enabling corruption, capturing institutions, and accumulating power.
Throughout its chapters, Dr. Meza analyzes the economic rationality of the criminal actor, the main manifestations of economic criminality, the industrialization of crime, analog-digital convergence, the use of virtual assets, money laundering, criminal governance, and the challenges of prevention, control, and risk management. The result is a work of high academic and professional value, aimed at understanding how crime adapts, organizes itself, obtains financing, conceals itself, and projects its effects onto the formal economy, public institutions, and democratic governability.
This publication constitutes a relevant contribution for researchers, professors, students, public officials, justice-system operators, and specialists in compliance, anti-money laundering prevention, financial intelligence, risk management, institutional security, and public policy. Its principal strength lies in integrating criminology, economics, law, finance, technology, governance, and risk management into a broad explanation of crime as a complex economic phenomenon.