conomy reached $1.3 billion in 1994, or "only" $25.20 per capita.A high degree of the criminality in the transition economies was brought about by the privatization and marketization processes. These crimes are not specific to transition economies but rather are related to the process of redistributing property rights. In Great Britain, for example, the Thatcherite promotion of popular capitalism during the 1980s distributed shares of denationalized industries to a large number of first-time investors. Despite the best intentions of policymakers and special legislation to protect investors (absent in Russia when privatization started), many small investors were tricked into selling their shares at unfairly low prices to those who flocked to London to take advantage of the new, deregulated financial markets.Economic crime is mobile. It is moving away from traditional sectors, such as industry and agriculture, and from traditional activities, like property theft and improprieties in the office, to new sectors, such as banking and insurance, and new activities that require sophisticated skills and organizational structures. The number of economic crimes in industry and agriculture in Russia declined from 36 percent of total registered crimes in 1993 to 25 percent in 1994, while the number of crimes in the financial sector more than doubled during the same period (a tenfold increase between 1992 and 1994). The share of "skilled" crime (fraud, illegal hard currency operations and counterfeiting, falsification of securities) increased to 31.3 percent in 1994 from 16.9 percent in 1993, while the share of routine thefts in the economy went down to 9.8 percent from 15.6 percent during the same period.Fertile Ground for CriminalsBribery and corruption are unavoidable in the current situation because the salaries of public servants are several times below the level of available supplementary income. For example, the salary of a top-ranking police ...
