ABSTRACT

To a large degree, transnational crime consists in illicit trafficking in both illicit and licit product. The latter, illicit trafficking in licit product, is becoming a main source of income for transnational organized crime and its implications are not as well appreciated by most scholars as is the illicit traffic in illicit product; it will therefore be dealt with in some depth. The term traffic covers, as Mark Duffield notes, both illicit trade in illegal product and illicit trade in legal product; in fact, he operates with two related, but separate terms, transborder trade and parallel trade.1 Transborder trade is a wider term than parallel trade, in so far as it encompasses both legal and illegal products, while parallel trade is the “informal” trade in products that are themselves legal. The most prominent product in illicit transnational trade in licit products is tobacco.2