From: The News (Pakistan)
KARACHI: Pakistan has emerged as the top country in Asia with illicit cigarette trade amounting to 32.6 billion cigarettes annually, with 41.9 percent of total cigarette trade being illegal in the country, a report by Oxford Economics showed.
“Asia Illicit Tobacco Indicator 2017: Pakistan” made available to media by Philip Morris International on Friday said Pakistan was losing more than Rs50 billion in taxes to illegal trade in the country.
Read Complete Article
From: LSE Research Online
Max Gallien
Abstract: Contemporary writing on North African borderlands invokes the idea of a general, unregulated porosity through which small-scale informal traders of food or textiles move alongside drug smugglers and terrorists. This paper challenges that conception, demonstrating that the vast majority of smuggling activity is in fact highly regulated through a dense network of informal institutions that determine the costs, quantity and types of goods that can pass through certain nodes, typically segmenting licit from illicit goods. While informal, the institutions regulating this trade are largely impersonal and contain third party enforcement, hence providing a direct empirical challenge to common characterisations of informal institutions in political science. The paper argues that revisiting the characteristics associated with informal institutions, and understanding them as contingent on their political environment, can provide a new starting point for studying institutions, the politics of informality, state capacity, and the regulation of illegal economies.
