The new economic geography and the illicit economy

In the previous chapter, we began exploring the world through the eyes of those engaged in transnational criminal activities and examined the effects that geopolitics has on their choices of locations from which to operate. In this chapter, we apply lessons from the new economic geography literature to how locational decisions are made. This literature focuses on explaining the geographical unevenness of the economic landscape and the dynamics of spatial clustering (or dispersion) of economic activities or what is known in the literature as economic agglomeration. New economic geography provides fresh insights into where illicit actors are likely to cluster to produce, transport, and distribute illegal goods and services. In effect, through ideas concerning the economics of agglomeration, new economic geography alerts us to where black spots might form and work together to influence the nature of the illicit global economy.